Critique of/in the Anthropocene.

The Nobel-prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen recently characterized the period marked by the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century to the present as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. While the idea of an era of planetary history driven by humanity would have been viewed as a great accomplishment by thinkers of the Enlightenment, it has come to be associated with the potential demise of all life on Earth. The arrival of the Anthropocene coincides with a sense that the twentieth century was characterized not by freedom, but the wholesale return of structural constraints that have thus far rendered social transformation impossible, bringing with it a profound sense of helplessness. As the authors demonstrate, the Anthropocene tends to naturalize what is historically specific about this dynamic, projecting back over the entire history, unable to work out the specificity of the environment-society problematic. Rather than dismissing the Anthropocene out-of-hand, the authors re-read the last century of the Anthropocene through the lens of three twentieth century critical theorists, namely Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, and Moishe Postone, and their critiques of reification, identity thinking, and traditional Marxism, respectively. Given that Lukács (1885-1971), Adorno (1903-1969), and Postone (1942 - ) each wrote successively, the authors work through the core critiques these theorists engaged as attempts to "name" crucial, yet elusive, aspects of the development of the environment-society problematic at different successive stages of the development of capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]