The Earth as Human Condition: Against Negative Worldbuilding in the Anthropocene

In this essay, we will use two thinkers that are not normally associated with debates surrounding the Anthropocene: Hannah Arendt and Achille Mbembe. Even though both of them are predominantly political thinkers, we think their ideas are a good avenue to explore when thinking about the Anthropocene. We aim to do three things within this paper: first, we will use Hannah Arendt’s concepts of world and earth – and the relationship between the two – to argue that humans are conditioned by the earth in the creation of their world. Using Arendt, we identify a productivist economy based on surplus and growth without limits that threatens the recuperative processes of the earth, and therefore the possibility of creating worlds. Second, we will argue that productivism not only creates worlds, but is also a process of what we in this paper will call negative world-building in that it creates worlds without meaning or humanity. We see two examples of these negative worlds in Mbembe’s concepts of death-worlds and zero-worlds. We perceive these worlds as manifestations of what Justin McBrien calls the Necrocene. Third, we will argue – with both Arendt and Mbembe – for a form of politics that allows for a positive creation of a plurality of worlds. This is based on the idea of a shared earth, and the ethics of cohabitation.

Earth, World and the Vita Activa

In The Human Condition Arendt identifies three kinds of human behavior and activities that make up the vita activa: “human life as it is actively engaged in doing something” (Arendt 1958, 22). These activities are labor, work, and action, and play out in different spheres – or conditions – of human existence: earth, world, and plurality, respectively. We will briefly examine each of these conditions and the aspect of the vita activa associated with it.

Arendt at first seems to draw a sharp distinction between earth and world. She conceptualizes the earth as the natural environment in which we, like other animals, live. The earth is characterized by cyclical movement: generations of lifeforms are replaced in recurring cycles that more or less stay the same. The uniqueness of individuals is irrelevant here (Chapman 2004, 64). For the earth, we are simply members of the same species, only differentiated through biology and genetic makeup. Death is not the loss of a specific person, but simply the replacement of one lifeform with another (Chapman 2007, 436). Labor is the activity tied to the earthly sphere: it consists of all activities that meet our biological needs or are part of our daily lives, like cooking or cleaning. These activities have no beginning or end (Chapman 2004, 62). Products of labor (such as food) are perishable: they are either consumed the moment they are produced, or returned to the earth through processes of decay.

We live on the earth as a biological species, but as human individuals we also inhabit a world that we create through work. Unlike labor, work produces durable products and artifacts, like books, tables – and buildings especially (Chapman 2004, 63). Work processes have a clear beginning and end, as they are done with specific ends in mind: the creation of durable artifacts. The products of work make up our world and provide a stable space in which we can speak and act. As such, work creates products that can never be fully consumed or destroyed (Oliver 2015, 97). Within this stable world we are differentiated in terms of personal identity and moral excellence: we are individuals that are born, live, and die. Human life takes on a linear, rather than cyclical movement in the world (Chapman 2004, 64). While our life on earth – as imagined apart from the world – is necessary for our survival, it only becomes meaningful within the world (Oliver 2015, 74-75). Moreover, while we do not share the earth according to Arendt, we do share the world: human activities are conditioned by the fact that we live together. As we will see, however, political problems within the Anthropocenic context put this distinction between a shared world and an earth that is not shared into question.

Arendt makes a further distinction between a world and the world. We share a world only with some people, while the world is shared by all: everyone who has ever lived and will ever live on the earth. Worlds are various perspectives or positions within the world. The “real, true, reliable world” is what these different worlds have in common. The world, however, is not the sum of all other worlds, but rather a variety of perspectives (Oliver 2015, 89). The more perspectives – or worlds – there are, the more we have of the world: not only will we understand the ‘real’ world better, it will also have a richer meaning. For Arendt (1958), existing together in the world makes us human. That world only exists through the plurality of human relationships that goes beyond “a simple multiplication of a single species” (1958, 90). This leads to questions about how many people are needed to make up a world: can a world consist of only one person? (1958, 87). Arendt herself does not seem to answer this question. For the purpose of our essay, however, we want to emphasize the shared character of worlds, and the world in particular.

While the distinction between earth and world seems sharp at first, Arendt states that the earth is a limit condition on the world: it limits where we can move and what natural resources are at our disposal to construct the world; and it determines the conceptual resources we use to build worlds with (1958, 75). Arendt sees the earth as given, the world as made: the given is a limit condition for what is or can be made (1958, 95). Our relationship with the made world, in turn, restricts our freedom as meaning-creating subjects. Our world consists of things produced by human activities, which in turn condition their human makers. Having a world means being enveloped in a setting in which things have a potential relationship to us (Whiteside 1994, 344). This potential relationship also connects us with others. Unlike private thoughts and sensations, it can be perceived not only by ourselves but by others as well. For Arendt, the things of the world lie between us: they both separate us from others as relate us to them (Chapman 2004, 64).

This relationship with others brings us to the last characteristic of the vita activa: action. For Arendt, action is the capacity humans have to act in ways that are unexpected, and to initiate something new. This capacity is facilitated by – and includes – speech. Arendt thinks that by acting, our humanity is most fully realized (Szerszynski 2003, 204). Because every human being is unique, their actions are unique and new as well. Furthermore, action is only possible because of other people: the condition of human action is therefore plurality (Chapman 2004, 63). Other individuals can react to an action, which then creates an unpredictable and boundless process: we cannot control the effects and consequences of our actions on other people. Therefore, action has no clear end and is only a beginning (Chapman 2004, 63). For Arendt, the highest form of action is politics, which she sees as acting in concert, or coordinated action within its condition of plurality.

Productivism and World-Alienation

In Arendt’s view, these three spheres of activity threaten to merge together in destructive ways through a process of productivism. Arendt described this process in 1958, but it seems to be as prevalent – perhaps even more so – with the context of the Anthropocene. Kelly H. Whiteside defines productivism as “an adherence to the belief that human needs can only be met through the permanent expansion of the process of production and consumption” (Whiteside 1994, 340).  Productivism – of which capitalism is a subset – is characterized by an emphasis on growth, which for Arendt stems from the modernist reduction of all values to that of life itself. Life processes become regulated through society: all energy is devoted to assuring everyone receives physical security and a wide range of consumption goods (Whiteside 1994, 348-349). Moreover, society encourages us to become ever more sophisticated in our appetites, removing any limits to consumption. Life is valued in an immediate, sensory way. This means a constant shifting of needs, tastes for luxury, and cravings for additional sources of pleasure, until “eventually, no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption” (Whiteside 1994, 349-350).

Under productivist conditions, the transient nature of labor has infected the permanent character of work. Production and consumption now engage in a continuous cycle, rather than the linear movement of work with its defined ends. As Bronislaw Szerszynski puts it: “questions of utility – of what is being done for the sake of what – becomes as impossible to answer and as irrelevant as they are in nature” (2003, 210-211). The cyclical nature of earth in this way invades the durable human world. This is in large part due to the fact that the stability of property – of tangible objects produced through work – has been supplanted by monetized wealth that can flow and accumulate in a way that mimics – or is even an extension of – life’s metabolic powers. However, unlike the earthly products of labor that are either consumed or returned to the earth, wealth has the capacity to create surplus. This way, growth overcomes the cyclical processes of decay that kept labor and life in check. Yet surplus is a double-edged sword: as the capacity for growth increases, so does the capacity for destruction. This in turn diminishes the earth’s recuperative powers (Szerszynski 2003, 212) Human actions threaten natural systems or cause them to produce very different conditions. This can result in drastic changes to the type and quantity of life that can be supported by an ecological system. On a global scale, this may threaten the continued existence of the human – as well as many other – species (Chapman 2007, 438).

Moreover, as Achille Mbembe (2019) states, western politics transforms from a realm of action and excellence into the administration of a self-propelling life process. Democracy is reduced to the right to consume, making it hard to envisage a different economy, different social relations, different ends and needs, or different ways of life (2019, 24). This threatens our world, as where work serves the world, labor only serves life itself without any regard to quality. We are therefore confronted with a growing world-alienation in which people abandon the togetherness of a shared public world for subjectivist consumption. Here we use David Macauley’s definition of alienation as a disturbance in our being at home on the earth and in the world: “a loss of roots and a common, shared sense of place, a realm of meaningful pursuits secured by tradition against the forces of change” (1992, 25).

Not only does productivism then threaten the earth through resource use, pollution and habitat loss, it also threatens the world that gives our life meaning and value (Szerszynski 2003, 212). As Mbembe notes, capital attempts to transform life itself into a commodity in an era in which all beings and species are only valued insofar they are available for consumption. This leads to a planetary pursuit of power and pure profit for their own sake. This power, moreover, is indifferent to any ends or needs except its own (2019, 21-22). Everyday life has been colonized by market relations, wealth-worship, and a mode of production based on the destruction of the natural foundations of life. Our work, needs, desires, fantasies and self-images in this way have been captured by capital (2019, 24).

While productivism yields the benefits of material abundance, it ultimately devours the sources of its own vitality. A society oriented towards growth that is presumed endless will ultimately run up against insurmountable limits. Catastrophe will then only be avoided by fundamentally changing modes of production and consumption (Whiteside 1994, 340). However, within capitalist society we face the choice of producing without regard to social or ecological ramifications, or risk not having access to the minimum of other products we need (Whiteside 1994, 343). Justin McBrien identifies this as a process of necrosis: the biological process that occurs after an injury in which cells are killed by their own enzymes (2016, 117). Capitalism works the same way, in that it is: “the reciprocal transmutation of life into death and death into capital” (Whiteside 1994, 117). Capitalism destroys and kills itself because of its own logic. Within this process, capitalist models and practices also annihilate whole ecosystems. Moreover, both extractive (e.g. in Africa) and deindustrialized economies (primarily in the Global North) now quickly accumulate surplus populations: those with insecure or no employment – or who will never be employed at all. For Mbembe, this signifies “a new age of capital when people and things can become the objects of a sudden process of devaluation and expendability. Disposable containers, they are subject to ‘obsolescence’ and can be discarded” (2019, 31).

McBrien therefore speaks of the Necrocene, “the age of death and extinction as a result of capitalist accumulation” (Batalla 2020, 67). For McBrien, extinction and death are essential characteristics of capitalism. Death is a fundamental trait of capitalist practices, since “capitalism leaves in its wake the disappearance of species, languages, cultures and peoples. It seeks the planned obsolescence of all life” (McBrien 2016, 116; see also Clark 2019). Capitalism, according to Mbembe, will either move towards increasing exploitation of large parts of the world through primitive accumulation of resources, or it will use its technological and regulatory prowess to “[squeeze] every last drop of value out of the planet” (2019, 33), most notably through “a planned human intervention in the climate system that would undermine all notions of limitation” (2019, 33).

Productivism threatens to destroy the world in two ways. First, by organizing society in such a way that people withdraw from the world into a realm of superficially meaningful subjectivism. Second, because it wreaks havoc on the earth, therefore endangering the very precondition for having a world. With people losing their world, the world is damaged. While productivism damages worlds, we argue that it also brings about processes of negative worldbuilding: the creation of worlds that lack the meaning and humanity of Arendtian worlds. We base our concept of negative worldbuilding on Szerszynski’s observation that activities of labor (in Arendt’s definition) can still leave permanent traces in the landscape, therefore producing their own ‘worldly’ structures. We argue that this holds especially true within the Anthropocenic context, as productivist processes have an ever-increasing impact on the planet. Moreover, these productivist processes often go hand in hand with local power dynamics and armed conflict, especially in regions such as the Sahel and Saharan Africa. This in turn is detrimental for how people within these regions are able to construct and experience their world. We find two types of negative worlds in the writings of Achille Mbembe, who explicitly uses world in a way we find in line with Arendt’s notion of the concept.

Negative World-Building: Death-Worlds and Zero-Worlds

Mbembe develops two concepts of negative worlds, the death-world and the zero-world. We see these negative worlds as belonging to the Necrocene epoch as described by McBrien. Death-worlds are “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2017, 59). They are governed by what Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics,’ a politics in which life and death are reversed, “as if life was nothing more than the medium of death” (Mbembe 2017, 59). Like the politics of life within productivism, necropolitical power too attempts to erase the distinction between means and ends. The inhabitants of death-worlds are surplus populations: redundant life which has neither market nor real human value aside from the kind of death that can be inflicted upon it. Necropolitics is indifferent towards cruelty and has no sense of responsibility or justice when it comes to these lives it has designated as redundant. As Mbembe asks: “capitalism in its present form might need the territory people inhabit, their natural resources (diamonds, gold, platinum, and so on), their forests, or even their wildlife. But does it need them as persons?” (2019, 30). Within death-worlds, people are not so much exploited as being utterly deprived of the basic means to move and the resources needed to produce a semblance of life – the basic stability needed to create positive worlds.

We find these death-worlds, for instance, in places within post-colonial Africa that are “extractive enclaves, some of which are totally disconnected from the hinterland, in some nowhere that is accountable to nobody except to petro-capital,” where “in order to create situations of maximum profit, capital and power must manufacture disasters and feed off disasters and situations of extremity that then allow for novel forms of governmentality” (Mbembe 2019, 30). These novel forms of governmentality come from a splintering of the monopoly on violence in these areas: military forces, police, judiciaries, local warlords, private security companies, and the criminal underworld form complex networks of temporary and shifting alliances to lay their hands on manpower and minerals (Mbembe 2017, 122). To these networks we might add the multinational companies of petro-capital. Repression and illegal trade go hand in hand in these areas, giving rise to political-cultural configurations where arbitrary violence runs rampant (Mbembe 2017, 55). Populations are regulated through wars waged to lay hold of resources. They are either killed, or their bodies are made maximum use of: either as manpower for extraction, or for (sexual) pleasure. Perpetrators of war and terror create new military markets, transforming themselves to means of production (Mbembe 2017, 56-57). They form alliances with transnational networks to further their exploitation and export of natural resources, which in turn feeds their wars (Mbembe 2017, 122-124).

Within the Anthropocene, terror inevitably takes on forms connected to the climatological context and way of life that is specific to different ecological environments (Mbembe 2017, 57). In the Sahel and Saharan Africa, for example, dynamics of violence closely follow – and are aimed at controlling the flows of movement and trade networks. Moreover, the desert itself is in movement, changing borders due to natural and manmade climate events (Mbembe 2017, 58). Nature also becomes the medium through which military and paramilitary violence is conducted. The militarization of nature and the naturalization of war are engaged in a dialectic in which earthly matter shapes the contours of conflict, and is shaped by them in return (Mbembe 2019, 21).

Where death-worlds are made through configurations of people in places where extractivist capital goes hand in hand with a fractured monopoly on violence, zero-worlds are landscapes left behind – but still marked – by exploitative activities. For Mbembe, these worlds on a deeper level represent the confrontation between humans and matter, and between humans and life. Specifically, it relates to processes in which humans themselves are transformed into matter – and the circumstances in which they perish. In the death-worlds, human life has value insofar as it can be killed or used as a resource. Life in the zero-world instead expands outward towards a different state that has no definite end (Mbembe 2017, 198-199). In the zero-worlds, both people and matter do not return to a previous state through a reclamation by nature. Rather, these landscapes – and the people used in exploiting it – are ‘used up’ and remain in this state.

In impressionistic terms, Mbembe paints a picture of landscapes wrecked by processes of extraction, littered with rusty machines and the ruins of factories and graveyards, populated by people that assume the same color as the dirt and the earth they mine through “as if they are already burying themselves” (Mbembe 2017, 199-200). Zero-worlds, then, are worlds left behind by the activities of unchecked labor, such as landscapes completely reformed through the mining of rare materials. While Arendt states that labor does not create world, we agree with Szerszynski’s observation that labor can leave enduring traces in the effects of its iteration, specifically in the landscape: “the ‘collapsing’ of patterns of activity into enduring structures such as landscapes and ecosystems gives labor/life the capacity to produce its own enduring worldly structures … [that] can serve as an enduring backdrop to human biographies, can provide places and objects for meaningful human interaction, can serve as objects of appraisal and judgment” (2003, 209). The zero-worlds, however, provide no meaningful human interaction. The still threatening presence of their objects only subject to appraisal and judgment insofar as the inhabitants of the landscape – indentured servants, exploited peoples – can bear witness to what has happened here (Mbembe 2017, 200).

So how do we escape this negative worldbuilding? How can we steer the emergence of the Necrocene towards that of what Batalla calls the Eleutherocene, “the age of liberated Earth and Humanity” (2020, 65)? We think this needs to be done by developing a politics that can restore “the witnessing structure of the world itself” (Oliver 2015, 93). We find the foundations of such a politics in the thought of both Arendt and Mbembe.

A New Politics

Mbembe proposes a world politics that is not based on difference but on an idea of equivalence and communality: “are we after all not condemned to live within each other’s field of view, sometimes within the same space?” (Mbembe 2017, 62). Due to this structural proximity there is no outside that can be placed in opposition to an inside: we cannot declare home to a protected area while wreaking chaos and death far away, where others live. “Sooner or later, we will reap at home what we have sown in foreign places” (Mbembe 2017, 62). To declare an area as protected can only happen in a mutual process. This requires a world politics that moves beyond thinking in terms of opposition and strangers, but also avoids the trap of a simplistic ideology of integration. More specifically: there has to be a clear distinction between universalism and communality. Universalism is based on absorbing people in a unity that is already formed; communality implies a relation of sharing, to belong to something together. This ‘something’ for Mbembe is the idea that this earth is all we have, and that it can only last when all rightful claimants share it together. Not only humans, but all species – without distinction (2017, 61-62).

We noted that for Arendt the earth is an essential part of the human condition. The earth is the ultimate given: we are all earthly embodied creatures entirely dependent on the world for our existence and freedom. In addition to living on the earth, we inhabit and share the world. The earth allows us to be able to create the worlds through which the world – as a variety of worlds or perspectives – becomes a richer, more meaningful place. An Eleutherocene politics should start by embracing the limits of the given. For Arendt, our freedom is freedom precisely because it is bound by what we cannot control and do not – cannot! – master. Our relationship to the given might change and evolve, and we have a responsibility to interpret the given as it affects our lives. However, we do not have the power to control or master it – and might not even understand or know it. We must therefore acknowledge our own limitations insofar as we master neither the given, nor the made (Oliver 2015, 95-96). Similarly, Mbembe notes that: “If to survive the ecological crisis means to work out new ways to live with the Earth, then alternative modes of being human and inhabiting the world are required. The new ecological awareness forces us to recover an appreciation of human limits and the limits of nature itself” (2019, 21).

Rather than imagining ourselves as limitless, we must create our world – and worlds – with what Arendt calls an understanding heart. This means accepting and embracing what is given, specifically the diversity of human existence. Arendt uses the term amor mundi (love of world) to refer to the love and friendship that carries over into our world-building activity. We should embrace our unchosen cohabitation with other people and other creatures of earth, and attend to them “in ways that open up rather than close off the possibility of response” (Oliver 2015, 102). Furthermore, we should acknowledge our own limitations, and exercise self-restraint (2015, 101). As Kelly Oliver writes: “If we associate what is given with the earth and what is made with the world, this means that for us the earth always requires a world in terms of which to view it […] finding our home may involve an endless journey visiting different worldviews in order to find ourselves situated – and, more to the point, situating ourselves – amongst them. It may involve wandering to the ends of the earth, metaphorically if not also literally” (2015, 102-103).

This, for us, resonates with what Achille Mbembe calls the ethics of the passer-by, an ethics based on the idea that we are more capable to name a place and live in it if we remove ourselves from it. According to Mbembe, we should strive to learn how to continuously travel from one place to another, establishing a double relationship of solidarity and distance (2017, 223-224). Becoming a human in the world, according to Mbembe, is a process of metamorphosis that requires us to embrace the fractured part of our lives; to obligate ourselves to take detours and facilitate sometimes unlikely encounters; to operate within the cracks because we value finding (and giving) a shared expression of things that would normally distance ourselves from others (2017, 222-223). For Oliver, these unlikely encounters with others should extend not only to our fellow humans, but to other lifeforms as well. Contrary to Arendt, we should acknowledge that nonhuman animals can also have worlds. Moreover, we should give up our fantasies of control and mastery over nature, and – through friendship and love – embrace the feeling of ‘uncanny strangeness’ that an encounter with another species gives us (Oliver 2015, 105)

Like Mbembe, Oliver theorizes that: “perhaps the possibility of being at home is bought at the price of continual wandering through the desert and oases of our imaginations and our planet” (2015, 110). We will always require a necessary element of the alien or foreign in every home, otherwise we run the risk of inaction or contentedness contradictory to both ethics and politics regarding the struggle for social justice (Oliver 2015, 103). As Arendt puts it: “The danger lies in becoming true inhabitants of the desert and feeling at home in it” (Oliver 2015, 103).

Conclusion

In this essay, we aimed to show how the writings of Hannah Arendt and Achille Mbembe might be relevant – and important – inclusions in the growing pile of literature on the Anthropocene. We specifically focused on the relationship between world and earth as defined by Arendt. This relationship is threatened by the forces of productivism, which not only causes us to retreat from our shared world into subjectivist consumerism, but also impacts the earth – and therefore the very precondition for creating worlds in the first place. Moreover, we argued that productivism not only destroys worlds but also creates negative worlds, as exemplified by Mbembe’s concepts of death-worlds and zero-worlds. We see these negative worlds as aspects of a Necrocene: an epoch marked by death and extinction. To steer the planet away from the Necrocene into the Eleutherocene – the era of liberated earth and humanity – we need a politics based on our sharing of the earth. This earth is what makes the creation of worlds possible: the world that we all share is a variety of these worlds or perspectives. If we want our world to be rich and meaningful, then, we should act in concert to create conditions that allow for a plurality of worlds, both human and non-human.

On a final note, we would like to state that this paper is not exhaustive. Other parts of both Mbembe’s and Arendt’s thought can be explored in the context of the Anthropocene, though they fall outside the scope of our current argument. As a specific example, both Arendt and Mbembe note the connections between the human-nature divide at the root of western metaphysics and politics, and the subjugation of indigenous peoples by colonizers. Because indigenous people regarded nature as their indisputable master – and thus behaved as part of nature – colonizers regarded them as lacking the specifically human reality of a world outside of nature (Mbembe 2017, 113). More generally, we think it is worthwhile to explore the parallels between Arendt’s and Mbembe’s thoughts on technology, nature, war and politics. We’d like to explore these avenues in future papers and recommend others to do so as well.

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