what problem does epimetheus face when it is humanitys turn to recieve a gift

Abstract

The Prometheus myth has long now provided inspiration for those who envision solutions to environmental bug. Prometheus is the figure par excellence of human forethought and progress in the anthropocene. In this article, we introduce the concept of ambient Prometheanism to depict the way of thinking that foregrounds foresight and anticipation and advances technological solutions developed by capital letter and energy-intensive projects. We question this stance, arguing that ambient Prometheanism, with its accent on technofix, leads to the economisation and depoliticisation of planetary environmental issues. Post-obit Bernard Stiegler, we recover from the myth the figure of Epimetheus, Prometheus' blood brother, also every bit his associated faculty, epimetheia to theorise what we call an 'Epimethean politics'. Thinking the anthropocene from the perspective of ambient Prometheanism and Epimetheanism ways to consider the role of technology in climate politics, and in particular to make the case for the importance of afterthought in face of unintended consequences and accumulated errors. To substantiate our argument, we outline the challenge posed by emerging solutions focussed on technological intensification (geoengineering) and socio-economic acceleration (dark-green growth and accelerationism). An Epimethean politics of the climate requires to utilize reflexivity as a capacity to anticipate, but likewise to mobilise epimetheia to account for accidents and past mistakes. Such a politics builds from an alternative conception of applied science, ane that radically differs from ambient Prometheanism. Finally nosotros read as actualisations of Epimethean politics contemporary eco-political struggles and their imperatives for multispecies living and convivial livelihoods.

Global environmental alter presents a situation of no-render: far from being simply a challenge to be overcome in the short term, it has opened a new epoch, the anthropocene, in which humans face themselves every bit a geophysical force. The anthropocene asks the states to address the question '"what to do" after "having done"' (Baranzoni, 2017, p. 44); in other words, it asks the states to consider our actions in the afterwardness of ascent temperatures and mass species extinctions. Still, it is apprehension and forethought that have captured the imagination of political leaders, policy makers and many environmentalists (Baskin, 2019).

In this article we argue that this preoccupation with foresight takes the class of a denialism that obscures the office that afterthought plays in the formation of disquisitional responses to the climate crisis. We introduce the concept 'ambience Prometheanism' to capture the pervasive doctrine that advocates humanity's power to face up the ecological crunch through costly technological interventions fuelled by intensified economisation. As opposed to explicit forms of denialism advanced by figures such as Trump, Bolsonaro, and their ilk (Lockwood, 2018), which rely on the negation of the very existence of climate change, the variety of denialism we outline hither calls to solve the climate crisis by ingenious solutions and dominates the discourse of international and national climate policy making and planning and hence its ambience dimension.

The recent fixation with electric cars as an integral aspect of a post-carbon economy is a skilful case of the ambiesnt Promethean logic. Rather than addressing social, racial and sexual inequalities and suffering produced past financialised capitalism, the craze for electric cars furthers business-equally-usual economic practices that update the American way of life. An Epimethean approach to green technologies such every bit electric cars would entail disrupting the linear timeline inscribed in the widely adopted framework of energy transitions. Co-ordinate to the latter, backer economies initially relied on wood, progressing to coal, and so to oil and now are inbound the next transitional stage of renewable energy. This framework is misleading: humanity has never consumed more coal and oil than today; this framework is based on 'a past that has never existed and a future that remains illusory' (Fressoz, 2021, p. eleven). The history of energy is not 1 of transitions, merely one of additions (Fressoz, 2021, p. 7).

The problem with the ambient Promethean doctrine is that information technology uproots specific technologies and innovations (in our example, electric cars) from their social, economic and historical/energetic contexts, while an Epimethean perspective, as this article will make articulate, is informed past epimetheia (afterthought). Therefore, it takes into consideration the demand for environmental justice, namely the redistribution of the ecological and social gains that produced particular technologies.

Ambience Prometheanism gains currency by posing every bit 'smart', 'green' and 'sustainable', appealing thus to environmentalists who are attracted to technological solutions, innovation and the vision of endless economic growth decoupled from natural resources. We propose that ambient Prometheanism is a denialism on two grounds: start it denies the urgency of the problem and defers transformative activeness to address the causes and social furnishings, focussing instead solely on its symptoms; second, information technology denies the possibility of alternative solutions and forsakes the possibility of alternative socio-ecological futures, repressing political ecologies that disrupt the current state of diplomacy by aspiring to less violent forms of convivial multispecies coexistence. Infused by an implacable techno-optimism, ambience Prometheanism offers a supposedly emancipatory vision that dismisses small-calibration transformative action as also boring, irrelevant and astern-looking.

The argument we offer in this article draws on the literature of contemporary political theory likewise as of political ecology, science and engineering science studies, and of political economic system, and will be of detail interest to political theorists who plow their attending to the tension between the climate emergency and technology.

The article is organised in 3 sections. In the get-go section, we discuss the reception of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in environmental thought. We note that although in the relevant literature Prometheanism is recognised as one of the possible responses to the anthropocene (Dryzek, 2013; Schlosberg, 2016), in fact few thinkers pay attention to the myth in its totality.

Moreover, the term Prometheanism has come to exist associated with 'technological solutionism' (Morozov, 2013), and today permeates policy responses to the ecological crisis that reduce it to a neat trouble that can be addressed through advisable technological interventions. Therefore, we return to the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in order to expose some of the assumptions made by social and political theorists nigh technology, but as well their lack of attending in using this myth – in particular, the forgetting of Epimetheus (Stiegler, 1998). The offset department, then, clarifies the footing upon which we build our critique of Prometheanism and develop our culling.

The second department offers a nuanced and expanded give-and-take of ambient Prometheanism, which we define as the doctrine that favours apprehension and foresight (prometheia) and focuses on large-scale commercialised technological solutions. Nosotros argue that this way of thinking cuts across ideological positions and permeates mainstream and emergent discourses on the climate crisis, ultimately leading to the economisation and depoliticisation of planetary environmental issues.

To illustrate this claim, we accept on the examples of green growth, accelerationism, and geoengineering and show how these manifestations of ambient Prometheanism impede transformative climate activeness and threaten convivial livelihoods. The critique of technofix (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011) that accompanies our discussion of ambient

Prometheanism does not spring from anti-modernist, reactionary, technophobic, or conservative dispositions; rather, it seeks to provide reasons for culling technologies as well as justification of specific modes of living that would be eradicated if technofix continues to reign. The climate crisis does non present a binary situation of either withdrawing from engineering science or accelerating technology with climate optimisation.

To counter this pervasive doctrine, in the last section, we theorise an Epimethean politics. In doing so, the commodity recuperates the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus to develop a critique of 'technological solutionism' without collapsing it into a rejection of applied science.

Nosotros argue that ambience Prometheanism leaves little space for reconsideration and reflection on past mistakes and accidents – actions associated with epimetheia. Epimetheia is particularly suitable to inform a politics fit to address the challenges posed by the anthropocene. Indeed, a progressive ecological politics should work – and occasionally does work – at expressing an Epimetheanism that counters ambience Prometheanism and inserts into commonage imaginary alternative eco-political practices and ways of thinking.

By because Prometheanism in the context of ecological politics, nosotros describe attention to the complex relationship betwixt engineering and climate change; by invoking Epimetheanism we seek to expand and deepen our agreement of the class that political responses to the climate crisis take.

To illustrate this point, we discuss actualisations of Epimethean politics, drawing inspiration not merely from the ZAD and NoTAV movements in French republic and Italian republic merely also from the works of Bernard Stiegler, Isabelle Stengers, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. We testify that Epimetheanism does not work in opposition to Prometheanism, but by composing with it; they form a composition of tendencies.

The invention of new technologies and alternative ways of using existing technologies has the potential to disrupt existing scenarios. Reconsideration, nosotros debate, has a crucial part to play in attempts to politicise global environmental modify and weave new political ecologies and futures.

Prometheus in the Anthropocene

Geologists have officially declared that nosotros live in the anthropocene, a new geological era shaped by human activities. The anthropocene working group (AWG) was created in 2009 to assess our electric current geological time and in 2016 it recommended to the international geological congress to recognise that the Earth has left the holocene and entered the anthropocene (Carrington, 2016). This proposition, however, is contested due to the complexity and the stakes involved in the report of the trajectory of the Earth system, only also due to lack of consensus in determining a precise start date as well as the birthplace for the anthropocene. Information technology remains a very recent and nevertheless evolving object of study for the geological community that frequently studies epochs spanning millions of years rather than thousands or hundreds of years. Yet, the notion of the anthropocene very quickly travelled to academic fields of enquiry across geology (Malhi, 2017).

Researchers in the social and human sciences have criticised the notion of the anthropocene for conveying a multitude of assumptions, specially related to the identity of the anthropos in question only also in relation to the normative claims that this concept encompasses (see especially Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016; Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2016). Its contested significant notwithstanding, we detect that the anthropocene provides a useful platform to talk over important political questions across disciplines.

For some environmentalists, the advent of the anthropocene provides the opportunity to fulfil the Baconian vision of human being mastery on nature. The figure par excellence of this vision is the titan Prometheus who has long been associated with the strand of environmentalism that advocates the deployment of technological solutions on a big scale as the solution to the ecological crisis and expresses unlimited confidence in human being ingenuity (Dryzek, 2013; Meyer, 2016).

Inherent to the Promethean vision is a conventionalities in an unlimited human power to innovate and resolve circuitous problems, which entails a view of humans as dominating everything else and of nature as an space set of resources (Dryzek, 2013, pp. 59–62). Historically, this figure of the ingenious man – always western white heterosexual male person – stars in the narrative that tells the story of the enlightenment and the scientific revolutions of the 17th century. In the 1970s and 1980s the logic of Prometheanism infused narratives that emerged equally a response to environmentalists' concern about natural scarcity and limits to growth, with some economists (e.g. Beckermann, 1974; Simon, 1981) arguing that nature is characterised past affluence rather than scarcity and that therefore technology and costless markets can ultimately safeguard economic growth infinitely and independently of the state of nature.

These narratives remained in public discourse through an ecology of policies, political speeches, and popular writings past figures such every bit Bjørn Lomborg who advanced ideas and practices congruent with the Promethean worldview. Although a new generation of Prometheans broadened the telescopic of bureau from complimentary markets to governments (Dryzek, 2013, p. 58), ultimately the thrust of Prometheanism – confidence in human ingenuity and abundance of nature – remained as the defining element of this doctrine. As Lewis (1992, p. 18) put it, 'in a Promethean environmental time to come, humans would accentuate the gulf that sets them apart from the rest of the natural globe, precisely in order to preserve and savor nature at a somewhat distant remove'.

More recently, this was exemplified in the ecomodernist vision of the Breakthrough Institute which took the thought of separating humans from nature to its extreme, proposing that this gap actually needs to be farther amplified in order to accost the ecological crisis (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). The logic of Prometheanism reinforces the modernist dichotomy between humanity and nature, claiming that decoupling homo progress from ecological impacts is the necessary condition for addressing the climate crisis. Prometheanism thus offers a feel-good story that celebrates infinite growth through technological advancements without unitended outcomes.

In scrutinising the implications of this logic, we suggest a return to the myth of Prometheus. In turning to mythos, nosotros refuse the rough dichotomy between reason and myth that intensified throughout the twentieth century with the procedure of rationalisation (showtime analysed by Max Weber) and the evolution of technoscience (Haraway, 2015; Nordmann, 2011). Indeed, information technology is this very intensified rationalisation that informs the prioritisation of technofix over political solutions to address the ecological crisis.

As Chiara Bottici (2007, p. 21) notes, the opposition of mythos to logos cannot be constitute in ancient Greek sources; it is a 'afterward interpretation of modern rationality in search of its origins'. In turning to mythos, we concur with Bottici (2007, p. 22) that myths 'elaborated in an epoch of crisis, served not only to provide an identity for the and so-called European or Western civilisation, but too to supply an ideological covering for its political expansionism'.

Our critical date with Prometheanism does not lie in its rejection as a myth that distorts reality and therefore equally a lower class of knowledge; this would entail a continuation of the false opposition between mythos and logos developed in the 20th century for the justification of the superiority of the scientific knowledge produced in the global northward over other forms of knowledge. Rather, our return to the myth is influenced past Stiegler'due south (1998) own retrival of Epimetheus every bit a figure and epimetheia as a faculty.

We practise not aim at recovering some supposed original version of the myth, but at understanding, first, how it has been used as an ideological covering for the pursuit of capital letter and energy-intensive technoscience and second, how its conceptual richness tin illuminate a necessary critique of 'technological solutionism'.

There are diverse versions of the Prometheus myth, the most common beingness those recounted by Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Protagoras/Plato. For the purposes of this article, we briefly recount the version of the myth narrated by Protagoras in Plato's (1966) dialogue with the aforementioned championship.

Following the creation of the earth, the two Titans were entrusted with distributing faculties to mortal creatures. Epimetheus persuaded his blood brother to allow him to do the distribution but being Epimetheus (and and then defective foresight) it was merely after completion of the chore that he realised that at that place was no faculty left for the human species. As he was reflecting on his action, Prometheus arrived to inspect his blood brother's work and found out nigh his fault.

As Protagoras explains, 'Prometheus, in his perplexity every bit to what preservation he could devise for man, stole from Hephaestus and Athena wisdom in the arts together with burn down' (Plato 321c-d); he and so offered them as gifts to humanity, becoming associated with ingenuity, foresight, but also love for the human being species.

We do non aim at providing yet some other estimation of the myth. Rather, following Stiegler (1998) we argue that we need to return to the myth in its entirety past way of taking a pace back and looking at the whole story so that we grasp the role of Epimetheus in this narrative. The central element of the myth is the encounter of the two brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus: 'for it is only when the two brothers run across each other that the temporal movement goes in both directors: Epimetheus looks at the past and understands his mistake, whereas Prometheus looks to the hereafter and understands the solution' (Dorfman, 2017, p. 71).

Stiegler (1998, 2017) revisits the myth to show the double logic at play in engineering, using his interpretation of the myth with Epimetheus at its center to develop an original concept of technics and technology equally palliative. In his reading, Epimetheus is the 'forgetful', the one who forgets to give human beings qualities, forcing Prometheus to steal burn (technics) from Zeus. This accidental forgetting is overcome by a production of prostheses and artifices: it is following Epimetheus' forgetting that Prometheus can employ foresight to make up for Epimetheus' mistakes.

The invention of these prostheses has considerable consequences for humans, every bit information technology is a way for them to extend their potentialities. For Stiegler, humans are characterised by a lack of essence and information technology is by inventing new prostheses that they palliate for this lack: 'the beingness of humankind is to be outside itself' (Stiegler, 1998, p. 193). As Stiegler elucidates, the overlooking of the figure of Epimetheus leads philosophers to misunderstand technics: the origin of technics is non found in the effigy of Prometheus alone merely in the Epimetheus and Prometheus couple.

We advise that it is simply past considering together the closely linked prometheia and epimetheia we can fully grasp the stakes of applied science amidst the climate crisis. If prometheia is the type of thinking that discovers solutions to the problem at paw, epimetheia is the quality of the intellect which manifests itself afterwards the solution given proves inadequate or has unforeseen ramifications.ⁱⁱ

At that place is, then, a difference in how each quality encounters the occasion: prometheia enables its exploitation, whereas epimetheia just returns to it ex posterior, past style of reflecting on information technology. The figure of Epimetheus brings to our attention the role of accidents and unintended consequences of human devices and plans. As Hans Jonas (1984) explains, the term accidents refers not to issues that emerge due to faults with technology, merely to the unforeseen side effects that technology can cause and which become evident only subsequently the use of technological solutions. Similarly for Stiegler (2017), engineering and accidentals arrive together, technologies are invented to respond to individual accidents and all the same technologies often produce glitches and failures. Thus, we advise that attending to epimetheia in view of global environmental modify can open a space for considering issues and challenges that unimpeded techno-optimism overlooks.

One way to understand Prometheanism in the current socio-ecological conjuncture is every bit a item vantage point of encountering the reality of the anthropocene. If the anthropocene is the era when humans have become a geological forcefulness themselves, then Prometheanism is the way of thinking that endorses the reality of the anthropocene equally a challenge that humanity can accost through technofix. As we clarify in the next department, although for some of its proponents the anthropocene is seen as an opportunity to advance a communism with a mod outlook, ultimately ambient Promethianism is unfit to escape the grip of unregulated technocapitalism. Just importantly, it is too a course of denialism that overlooks transformative action and the question of accidents and unintended consequences opened up by Epimetheus, as it will become clear in the last section.

Although the vision of humanity every bit a self-conscious maker of its own destiny is imbricated in the thought of modernity, today the Promethean way of thinking goes beyond modernity'southward projection of progress as articulated in the political theory of Proudhon (1972) or Marx (1967). In this ambience Prometheanism – further clarified in more than item in the adjacent section – at pale is the survival of the human edifice, even at the expense of not-man worlds.

Although nosotros draw on Stiegler, we expand his line of argument from faculties (prometheia and epimetheia) to vantage points to consider the global environmental crisis in dynamic terms and therefore as the consequence of decades of what ecology historians Bonneuil and Fressoz call 'disinhibition', that is, a process of forgetting past mistakes and superseding early on warnings. Rather than simply attempting to deconstruct Prometheanism, we fence that recovering epimetheia/prometheia as a composition of tendencies contributes to a political theory of the anthropocene.

Nosotros demonstrate this in the terminal section where we explain how this expanded understanding of human abilities disrupts existing power relations and creates opportunities for politicising global environmental change.

Manifestations of Ambient Prometheanism in the Anthropocene

Like Prometheanism, the concept of ambient Prometheanism that nosotros introduce here does not refer to a homogenous project or school of thought; to suggest this would be to overlook the many contradictions and divergences that characterise it, both epistemologically and politically. The trajectory of environmental Promethanism, from an anti-environmental stance against arguments for the existence of ecological limits to an environmental doctrine championing free-market economy and technological intensification, is well documented (Dryzek, 2013; Meyer, 2016). Prometheanism is underpinned by 'a theory of human ingenuity, merely also a theory of nature's abundance' (Dryzek, 2013, p. 70).

We propose the concept ambient Prometheanism to highlight its pervasive nature: today more than than ever earlier, Prometheanism is unbounded. Ambient Promethanism infuses policies, practices, and ideas endorsed and avant-garde by progressives (Meyer, 2016), reactionaries and climate deniers who plough to engineering all the same (Hamilton, 2013), accelerationists (Brassier, 2014; Williams and Srnicek, 2014), and techno-communists (Bastani, 2019). Rather than suggesting that these various instances of ecological thinking should be lumped together, we offer the term ambience Prometheanism to capture the ubiguity of the organized religion and trust in prometheia in responses to the climate crisis today.

As a vantage point to encounter the anthropocene, ambient Prometheanism advances a certain disposition towards limits (and the possibility of their transgression), engineering science (with economic imperative), and time (specially the hereafter). To mankind out this argument, in this section we discuss three instances of ambient Prometheanism: green growth, accelerationism, and geoengineering. Equally manifestations of ambient Prometheanism, they all lead to the economisation and depoliticisation of global environmental change past attributing a special office to technoscientific capitalism in climate action and past leaving existing destructive power relations (between humans just also between homo and not-human species) intact.

The Promethean fashion of thinking contributed to the de-radicalisation of the environmental movement in the 1980s and the turn to technology not every bit a point of critique, merely as a source of solutions (Neyrat, 2019). This was in turn related to the increasing scientisation of environmental governance (Bäckstrand, 2004): as environmental problems were perceived as beingness more and more than complicated and technical (due east.m. acid rain and ozone hole), they had to be 'managed' using highly specialised scientific knowledge.

In policy making, this scientisation of ecological politics took the course of ecological modernisation, a framework that emphasises the compatibility of environmental protection and pursuit of economic development. It is in the context of this particular framework that the first instance of ambient Prometheanism we examine emerged, with social thinkers proposing that environmental problems far from creating challenges to industrialised societies they really offer opportunities for economic growth and enterpreneurship.

Originally advanced by the ecology leader Van Jones (2009) to link labour with environmental demands, the idea of 'light-green growth' was updated and adapted to fit mainstream policy making following the financial crisis of 2007–2009, gaining traction as a manner of bridging the need to protect natural resources and stimulate the economy. Information technology is in this updated form that 'green growth' is championed by international organisations such every bit the Globe Banking concern, the Imf, as well as the Un, which adopted it officially in the briefing on sustainable evolution (or Globe summit) in 2012. It is also promoted by near heads of G8 states, who employ the idea of 'dark-green growth' to accelerate neoliberal economical and social policies (Hatzisavvidou, 2020).

It is thus a commonplace in hegemonic discourses on how best to deal with global environmental change. The premise of the argument for 'dark-green growth' is that the problem of 'environmental degradation' tin be solved without abandoning the vision of economic growth. The creation of light-green technologies and dark-green markets is the necessary condition for achieving this double goal. Green growth promises to enable the pursuit of progress (ever understood as countless economic growth) without requiring whatsoever changes in 'mod' values, ways of living, and patterns of social and economic arrangement. Fueled by dark-green free energy, the argument goes, dark-green growth represents a paradigm shift with the potential to generate sustainable and equitable relations between environment, economy, and society.

'Greenish growth' is a course of ambience Prometheanism, in the sense that it denies the being of natural limits to growth; information technology affirms technology funded through vast investment equally the primary means for addressing global environmental change, relying on the economisation and financialisation of natural resources, means of knowing, and carbon emissions; and it projects the possibility of a future that tin exist already anticipated since humanity will take dominated over every other grade of life. Information technology thus obscures the political complexities of the anthropocene, reducing activity to investment and financial incentivisation.

At the aforementioned time, the very concept of dark-green growth is an oxymoron, as the idea assumes that GDP growth can exist permanently and absolutely decoupled from resource use and emissions and that it is possible to disconnect economic and social well-being from the use of biophysical resources. Decoupling is at the heart of the 17 sustainable evolution goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN Surroundings Programme (UNEP).ⁱⁱⁱ

However, in reality there is lilliputian empirical evidence that such separation is attainable (Hickel and Kallis, 2019). Even if decoupling becomes feasible technologically, the real question will be if economies and societies could be decarbonised fast enough to stay under 1.5 degrees – or inside the 'safe operating space for humanity' (Rockström et al., 2009).

Ambient Prometheanism also manifests itself in social and political theories that abet that accelerating the speed and intensity of product the material platform of capitalism tin be repurposed for common ends (Williams and Srnicek, 2014). The result of this 'Promethean politics of maximal mastery over guild and its environment' volition be a society with less piece of work with liberty and luxury for all through technological innovation and automation (Bastani, 2019).

Accelerationists envision the transgression of the limits of human being ingenuity, natural resources, and even biology, facing future with the optimism of those who have accented noesis and command over the forces of nature and history. They thus overlook both the political character of the technologies they endorse, as well as the fact that these technologies operate under the firm grip of capital.

Accelerationists besides reject the idea of planetary limits, since this could block opportunities for growth. They hence come across the global ecological crunch primarily as the opportune time to transgress capitalism and create a organisation of 'extreme supply' through the deployment of industrial-calibration renewable energy systems funded past national free energy investment banks (Bastani, 2019).

A third manifestation of ambient Prometheanism is the idea of intentional modification of climate (geoengineering) in order to alleviate the impacts of climate change. International organisations such every bit the United Nations and World Depository financial institution have already integrated arguments for geoengineering into their soapbox, diffusing the idea that such interventions in the Earth's climate are possible, viable, and inherently necessary.

The ambient Prometheanism manifested in geoengineering proposals celebrates the human power to overcome even the well-nigh complex bug, which information technology collapses into a technological claiming that tin can exist addressed if vast amounts of money are pumped into the chore. This technological solutionism silences the need for radical change of current social and economic arrangements and instead advocates the demand to proceed to work more intensively to secure humanity'due south existence on the planet.

Accutely aware of the impossibility of safely and responsibly deploying geoengineering solutions in the near future (Chatterjee and Huang, 2020), proponents of ambient Prometheanism intentionally overlook the complexity and uncertainty of geoengineering projects, keeping their gaze stock-still upon stakeholders' shares and profits and forgetting that our current ecological condition was acquired by the aforementioned hubris they demonstrate. In this instance of ambient Prometheanism, climate action is deferred for the future, comfortably placed on the shoulders of future generations.

The three instances of ambient Prometheanism discussed briefly in this section differ in their conceptualisation of the political agent most appropriate to drive climate politics in the anthropocene. They as well differ in the socio-economical outcomes they abet. However, they all share a business firm belief in the demand to transgress any limits that nature may place on man activities, their optimistic organized religion in technological progress, and their acceptance of an abstract future every bit the horizon of climate action.

For proponents of ambience Prometheanism, climate action is substantially near the deployment of techno-fixes and 'green' economic measures. What this way of thinking leaves untreated is existing ability relations and the necessity to claiming them if a more than equitable socio-ecological formation is to be materialised, not in the distant 2050 but hic et nunc.

Epimethean Politics

A radical ignorance of the future

Ambient Prometheanism manifests itself as a way of thinking that is pervasive and ubiquitous in various approaches to the global environmental crisis, from hegemonic ones promoted past international organisations and green enterpreneurs, to insurgent visions espoused by techno-communists. Every bit a way of encountering the antrhopocene, information technology cuts across ideological positions, diffusing techno-optimism and deferral.

In this last section, nosotros turn to the figure of Epimetheus in order to elucidate a mode of thinking that disrupts and challenges the pervasiveness of ambient Prometheanism. Much similar Prometheanism which emancipated itself from the myth, information technology is not sufficient to come back to the original Greek sources to imagine Epimetheanism, every bit a force that counters Prometheanism.

An Epimethean climate politics is one that addresses the claiming posed by emerging solutions focussed on technological intensification and socio-economic dispatch, such every bit those discussed in the previous section. To the extent that it is a response to an outcome that is already unfolding, it is a politics of afterthought. Prometheanism and Epimetheanism are not opposites but composites, equally information technology will be become articulate.

Our approach is in line with interpretations of the myth offered by other scholars. As Detienne and Vernant (1991, p. 18) remind usa, 'Prometheus and Epimetheus stand for the 2 faces of a single effigy just as the prometheia of man is simply the other side to his radical ignorance of the future'. We detect that this idea of 'radical ignorance of the future' is especially relevant to the case of global environmental alter, the unprecedented character of which means that yet the ingenious responses that homo societies can develop, the outcome of this intensified, technologically mediated date betwixt humans and nature is highly uncertain.

The experience of the Covid-xix pandemic can be seen as an actualisation of this radical ignorance of the future and the sudden opening of a 'new normal'. Billions of people participated in this new social experiment in times of local and nation lockdowns: the apply of digital technologies to store for groceries, to teach and learn at schools and universities, to socialise and even to have admission to medical advice. Many referred to Covid-19 every bit a prefiguration of anthropocenic times.

Although by mobilising prometheia proponents of ambient Prometheanism can provide some solutions or a recourse to global environmental challenge, the radical ignorance of the future entails that Epimetheanism also has an important role to play. Epimetheia is the stage of cognition that becomes relevant in confront of overshight and accumulated errors. The domination of ambient Prometheanism and hence foresight and apprehension in the public imaginary is so totalising that the other side of the Promethean myth is normally overlooked.

Even though Epimetheus is typically associated with forgetfulness, as Detienne and Vernant notation, prometheia is only the other side of this forgetting (epimetheia): it could non work without committing and then recognising the accident.

We advise then that it is more productive to recollect of prometheia and epimetheia non as polar opposites, but equally tendencies that demand to be kept together to shed light to the kind of response more pertinent to climate breakdown. Where Prometheanism mainly projects the importance of ingenuity and forethought, Epimetheanism draws our attention to the crucial job of reflection and afterthought by including prometheia. A politics mainly cartoon on epimetheia will be erring, posing a technophobia equally its core principle.

In the balance of this article, we clarify the pregnant and workings of epimetheia. Beginning, nosotros talk over it along with reflexivity, which other scholars conceive as the capacity to anticipate rather than to think of the consequences of mistakes. We then outline in physical terms what Epimethean politics looks similar by drawing on the contend on the shifting baseline syndrome, too every bit contempo scholarship by Bonneuil and Fressoz, Stengers, and Tsing.⁴ Finally, nosotros highlight the practical outlook of epimetheia by briefly discussing some political instances of eco-political activism in France and Italy.

Reflexivity and epimetheia

Political thinkers have attended to the importance of foresight in ecological politics. For instance, Dryzek and Pickering (2019) refer to foresight as an essential aspect of what they telephone call ecological reflexivity. They distance themselves from adaptive governance and adaptive management in public policy that favour a success-and-failure approach for institutions. They annotation that, given the instability of the Earth system, institutions have to transform themselves, whereas path dependency prevents effective responses to the climate emergency and the threats to biodiversity. Thus they argue that a state shift in institutions is required to 'forestall catastrophic country shifts in the Earth arrangement itself' (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019, p. 151).

Socio-political institutions cannot exist apart from their geophysical setting, and ecological politics starts by taking this inseparability into business relationship. In short, their position is in line with the famous slogan: 'System change, not climate change!'

We desire to show below that ecological reflexivity is only 1 element to counter Prometheanism and that Epimethean afterthought can be a way to deepen the scope of reflexivity. Drawing on the piece of work of reflexive modernity theorists such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Dryzek and Pickering (2019, p. xviii) affirm ecological reflexivity as an approach that 'listens and responds to signals from the Earth organisation, and has the foresight to anticipate potentially catastrophic changes in the arrangement'. As they fence, ecological reflexivity is the chief requirement for institutions in the anthropocene, since this capacity enables questioning cadre commitments and therefore adjusting to the new geophysical reality and the challenges it creates. Anthropocene institutions are required to embody foresight, namely not only 'a business organisation for the hereafter effects of current deportment and a recognition that what worked in the by will not necessarily work in the hereafter', but also 'a chapters to anticipate human acquired land shifts and act earlier the shift occurs' (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019, pp. 46–47).

Institutionally embedded ecological reflexivity is indeed a necessary condition of a climate politics that is deeply committed to reverting damage washed by anthropocene institutions. What we argue more specifically here is that epimetheia helps counter the grand narrative of the anthropocene written by 'anthropocenologists', as Bonneuil and Fressoz call them. As they clarify (2016, p. 74), the problem with this narrative is that it unfolds around 'subjects from the past who did not human action deliberately, who were unaware – who once were blind but now tin know'. With reflexive modernity or with the anthropocene, humans have suddenly overcome their innocence regarding the social and ecology consequences of progress or modernity.

As Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016, p. 78) rightly note, 'this narrative, "forgetting" the ecology reflexivity of modern societies, tends to depoliticise the ecological problems of the past and thus obstructs understanding of present issues'. In the anthropocene, politics cannot anymore exist near 'sensation-raising' since the cognition and stories about ecological disasters and the end of the world have been around for a long time, the ii environmental historians demonstrate. Past forgetting the historical processes that generated the anthropocene, those who focus merely on foresight and apprehension – prometheia – leave intact the ability relations that the World system has been subjected to for centuries.

To put it more simply, reflexivity regarding environmental degradation and injustice has been around for a long time, almost 200 years co-ordinate to the French historians. Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016, p. 79) pave the way for the importance of epimetheia in making the case for an environmental history that accounts for by actions and mistakes:

Rather than suppressing the environmental reflexivity of the past, we must understand how we entered the Anthropocene despite very consequent warnings, knowledge and opposition, and forge a new and more credible narrative of what has happened to united states of america.

Much similar in the Greek tale, Prometheus would not have had the faculty of foresight without the blow, that is the constitutive oversight from Epimetheus. Foresight works after the accident, in the reflexive moment of the reconsideration; information technology cannot function past anticipating or preventing the ecological state shifts in a vacuum.^five

A useful tool through which we can call up nigh the ramifications of oversight and forgetfulness in the anthropocene is the shifting baseline syndrome. Originating in the context of fisheries, information technology posits that people increasingly adapt to the new situation and forget nearly past environmental conditions. The syndrome refers to the fishermen's perception of the fauna limerick of the seas and the stock size established at the beginning of their career and used equally a baseline to estimate the development of the stock. This results in a gradual acceptance of the loss of fish species (Soga and Gaston, 2018, p. 222).

This syndrome is based on deeply subjective data since it results from lifetime feel of the shifting baseline, and it can exist practical to many other contexts. The shifting baseline syndrome 'involves a gradual modify in the accepted norms for the status of the natural surround due to a lack of experience, memory, and/or knowledge of its by condition' (Soga and Gaston, 2018, p. 222). The baseline of what was habitual continually shifts from generation to generation; as a result, environmental degradation becomes increasingly tolerated.

For instance, Jens-Christian Svenning (2017) uses this concept to think most the extinction of wild megafauna (creature species larger than or equal to twoscore-five kilograms body mass). In the anthropocene, nearly big mammals are under threat and this is not straight linked to changes in the climate (since they managed to adapt to other periods of strong climatic stress) merely to the reconfiguration of biogeography past humans. This extinction has long-term ecological effects; information technology is only by taking a long-term ecological perspective that we can imagine 'diverse landscapes that have existed in pasts across human memory' (Svenning, 2017, p. G68). The focus on antitipation of technologically benign futures increases tolerance for past ecological degradations, when what is needed is afterthought: pondering what to practise after having done.

The multispecies politics of epimetheia

Even when deemed 'substantivist and proceduralist' (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019, pp. 56–57), institutional modify can forget realities of other ontologies and worlds. An Epimethean ecological politics is not only a way to take care of the Globe and non-humans – to develop empathy and enlarged sensibility; rather, it is premised upon a commitment to dissimilar modes of existence.

The anthropocene is the geophysical outcome of the liberal ontology that is world-destroying – analysed with precision by Jason Moore (2016) equally 'capitalocene'. We cannot forget about the destruction of species and forms of life since 'naught deserves devastation' equally Stengers (2018, p. 87) puts it axiomatically. When we project ourselves with foresight or with afterthought, we need to account for the imperatives of multispecies living.

Stengers and Tsing have emphasised in their corresponding work that ecology is a science of relations rather than the report of individual entities.^half-dozen Hence the accent on the construction of worlds (and earth-making) is cardinal to political theory and do in the anthropocene (Dillet 2021). For example, when activists block the construction of large-calibration projects, for instance those of Notre-Dame des Landes most Nantes in France or the France-Italy train connection through the Alps, they likewise oppose the 'earth' that these projects will bring into life. For instance, ZAD activists' master slogan was 'Against the airport and its world'.

These activists bring to attention the potential losses that these projects would bring about, thus demonstrating prometheia; only they also demonstrate epimetheia as they depict from the knowledge accumulated through past mistakes. Their practices need 'the possibility of restitution, a kind of restitution of the land dorsum to the collective' (Ross, 2018, p. xviii). Rather than a reactionary arroyo to the past and territories, these movements are experimentations in and creations of new ecologies. Ane could argue that these are minor movements compared to the immensity of climate crisis, but they have already had pregnant victories against states and big corporations.

Several similar movements emerge around the world today, seeking to replace the existing flows of majuscule, energy, and power with new systems of customs production and consumption. They thus represent a growing disposition and practice which speaks to the demands of climate and environmental justice movements that restructure everyday practices (Schlosberg and Coles, 2015).

These political agents practice not merely defend lands and trees. Restitution here needs to exist distinguished from ecological restoration. Equally ZADists defending existing ecologies and territories put it, 'we do not defend nature, but we are nature that defends itself' (Quadruppani, 2018, p. 26). They prepare habitations, collective kitchens, libraries but also meetings and workshops, they utilise different materials and forms with bully inventiveness and joy. They identify their political activeness as participating in the making of a multispecies ecology, thus pointing to the inseparability of homo social club and nature. They work at establishing long-lasting multispecies relations but are faced with constant dismantling by the law and the state. Equally they aggregate more than and more victories, the ZADs in France accept grown larger in the terminal few years, gaining recognition from local communities, politicians, and intellectuals alike.

Central to these practices is the imperative to re-appropriate ways of doing and means of knowing that are increasingly segmented and made inaccessible. By encouraging monocultures, backer production has wearied social and natural relations, between unlike species, human and non-humans but also their milieus of being. Copse and forests, individuals and their myths, also as soil and atmospheres are no longer entangled; they are part of a mural of ruins.

Nonetheless, as Tsing (2015, p. 6) reminds us, these ruined places tin can still 'exist lively despite announcements of their death; abandoned asset fields sometimes yield new multispecies and multicultural life'. Tsing describes the possibility for multispecies living in the ruins of late capitalism by looking at the natural, geological, social and economical history of matsutake mushroom. Equally she argues, this mushroom can only abound in the ruins of capitalism, in the precarious globe; 'precarity is the condition of our fourth dimension' (Tsing, 2015, p. xx).

Far from justifying the condition quo and fetishising ruins, Tsing develops an art of noticing and sensing the new worlds that proliferate in precarity, the invisible or less-than-visible resistance that continues to abound and alive. Hence, for Tsing political environmental needs to develop a new concept of nature, nature every bit a resurgent event, defining resurgence as 'the work of many organisms, negotiating across differences, to forge assemblages of multispecies livability in the midst of disturbance' (Tsing 2017, p. 52). She draws the idea of resurgence from her ethnographic work that examined the dynamic processes of forests; every bit she says, 'copse are mobile – and thus they tin answer to farming' (Tsing, 2017, p. 54). During the holocene, 'farmers cutting back forests, but every time farms were abandoned, forests took dorsum the state. Mimicking their post-Ice Age spread, forests kept returning' (Tsing, 2017, p. 54). Tsing'south concept of resurgence is precious to our project of imagining an Epimethean politics beyond technofix, as it is a resource to conceive culling technologies and their corresponding modes of living.

Hither nosotros read Tsing with Bonneuil and Fressoz who argue that every epoch has social struggles against specific technologies. For instance, in the 19th century long social struggles took place to protect forests and we tin find examples of resistance to specific innovations in the 18th century too, and these were not a total rejection of modernity or progress but critiques that supported the now-forgotten alternative innovations:

This resistance was never against engineering as such, but confronting a item technology and its power to trounce others, and we need to unfold the spectrum of alternatives that existed at each moment: canals instead of railways; improved oil lamps instead of gas lighting; flexible and quality production instead of mass production; and an artisanal chemistry with expertise in qualities and sources rather than industrial chemistry, etc. (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016, p. 261)

Culling technologies are associated with culling modes of living. Every applied science favours some people over others since it modifies the milieu of social interactions (especially the sectionalization of labour, but not just), and 'technological choices demand to be fabricated in a more than rather than less democratic' way (Eckersley, 2017, p. 989). And as Robyn Eckersley notes, given the tension between the curt-term electoral bicycle (iii–5 years) and the long-term Earth system processes, only a radical democracy can business relationship for the entanglements of humans with not-humans.

Resurgence finds itself in between these ii temporalities. In this sense, it is not enough to integrate not-humans in liberal democratic parliaments – what Bruno Latour has been proposing for almost thirty years. This only accounts for one dimension of epimetheia: it is a politics that happens after the permanent non-inclusion of non-humans just that does not act upon the forgetting itself.

While Prometheanism puts forward 1000 projects in complete denial of constitutive acts of forgetting, Epimetheanism begins every bit a remembering of the forgetful. Past making infinite for remembering past mistakes and investigating the ruins – the damages to both humans and non-humans – the possibility of life in capitalist ruins becomes visible. Nature is non something inert only a receptacle of resurgent events. It is not only an enclosed spatial territory that needs to be dedicated or preserved, merely an effect that has seen many occurrences and accidents. Nature is historicised since it has been damaged by centuries of extractivist, colonialist, patriachal and capitalist evolution, but likewise noticed, cared for and entangled in stories and relationships (Di Chiro, 2019).

This is crucial since it prevents the adoption of a simplistic understanding of nature every bit static or as being entirely carve up from humans. As Soper (2016) notes, nature is separate from humans but every human practice is conditioned by it. By attending more than carefully to the relations between humans and non-humans, the 'cross-species relations that make forests possible', we can start imagining our ain 'livability in the midst of disturbance' (Tsing, 2017, p. 52). This does not corporeality to rejecting technological research and progress; information technology amounts to imagining technologies, simply abandoning them when it is impossible to account for their unintended consequences. In other words, information technology amounts to non forgetting mistakes that have already been fabricated.

Conclusion

This article proposes the concept of ambient Prometheanism to depict a hegemonic trend in global responses to the climate emergency that focuses on technofix and intense economisations. This opinion besides has advocates in gimmicky political and social theory. Post-obit Stiegler (1998) we demonstrate that by focussing on anticipation and ingenuity, the office played by Epimetheus and the associated faculty of epimetheia (every bit reconsideration or deferred thinking) in the myth is near of the fourth dimension forgotten. Through its preoccupation with technoscientific solutions prometheia/foresight appears to be forward-looking, concerning the future; paradoxically, though, the bodily focus of Prometheanism is the nowadays – often following the economic imperative and the maximisation of profits. At the same fourth dimension, because it concerns reflection on past mistakes, epimetheia/afterthought appears backwardslooking, as if it is about the past; yet it is about the present, with a project in the future. It manifests in the nowadays, simply after having done, aiming to inform planning in the time to come.

Epimetheia has an important role to play in ecological politics in the anthropocene, non least considering information technology prevents forgetting humanity's office in global environmental modify or the inseparability of society/nature. By emphasising the demand for decoupling production from natural resources or for accelerating the process of terraformation and the applied science of the Earth, proponents of ambience Prometheanism have made anticipation and planning announced more than positive and useful than afterwardsness and deferred thinking.

Considering our radical ignorance of the future, nosotros need epimetheia so that we practice not forget by accumulated errors that led to climate breakdown. Epimetheanism is, therefore, the doctrine that gives space for remembering of the forgetful and acting upon this forgetting. Information technology complements and composes with Prometheanism that is the forgetting of the forgetful, in other words, the forgetting of deferred thinking.

Epimetheus' afterthought is helpful to overcome the denialism that nosotros diagnosed at the start of this article. To forge more equitable, convivial multispecies relations, we – a 'we' that is inclusive and invitational – should consider alternatives that exist or try to be born amidst the ruins while transcending existing socio-ecological inequalities.

Notes

1. one.

   Past defining epimetheia as an intellectual faculty we do not oppose it to other types of faculties. The exercise of the intellect (noesis) is interconnected with embodied dispositions and functions. As Massumi (2002, p. four) explains, what is at stake in attempts to reverberate on human experience as the register of affect, sensing, and thinking is the avoidance of 'the Scylla of naive realism or the Charybdis of subjectivism'.

2. 2.

   SDG 8 'Decent Work and Economic Growth' pledges to 'improve progressively, through 2030, global resource efficiency in consumption and production and endeavour to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation, in accordance with the 10-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production, with developed countries taking the lead'.

3. three.

   These authors build on the traditions of ecofeminism and environmental justice which examined and challenged with precision the environmental inequalities produced by environmental planning, ecological deposition and the extractivist logic of the Western liberal ontology. Here we can point to the trend in greenish political theory to forget the tradition of ecofeminism (MacGregor, 2020). Other authors have adult really powerful frameworks that capture the intersectional complexities of environmental inequalities; see for case the contempo piece of work of Giovanna Di Chiaro (2020) to design an intersectional ecology justice. We would similar to give thanks one of the anonymous referees for flagging this point.

4. 4.

   In The Historic period of Disruption, Stiegler (2019, pp. 124-129) reads Bonneuil and Fressoz's piece of work on dishinbition critically, for lacking the possibility to problematise the 'phase-shift' that takes identify betwixt private and social processes of individuation and technical individuation. He reads their work every bit defeatist since they call to learn to live in the anthropocene, thus joining critical voices against Harraway'due south telephone call to stay with the trouble and Tsing's telephone call to follow nature's resurgence. Surprisingly Stiegler did not come across the parallel with his work on epimetheia and prometheia and Bonneuil and Fressoz; peradventure he would take expanded on this difference in the future works that he appear but could not complete (in detail the 2d book of Automatic Society).

5. 5.

   Michael Uhall (2021) has recently adult a new theory of the 'ecologically conditioned discipline', while others accept discussed the possibility of a multispecies justice (Celermajer et al., 2020).

References

• Baranzoni, Due south. (2017) Anthropocenic times: Stratigraphy of a passage. Azimuth 9: 43–threescore.

  Google Scholar

• Baskin, J. (2019) Geoengineering, the Anthropocene and the Finish of Nature. Palgrave: Basingstoke.

  Volume  Google Scholar

• Bastani, A. (2019) Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso: London.

  Google Scholar

• Beckermann, Westward. (1974) In Defence of Economic Growth. Greatcoat: London.

  Google Scholar

• Bonneuil, F. and Fressoz, J.B. (2016) The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and United states. Verso: London.

  Google Scholar

• Bottici, C. (2007) The Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge Academy Press: Cambridge.

  Volume  Google Scholar

• Brassier, R. (2014) Prometheanism and its critics. In R. Mackay and A. Avenessian (eds.) Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic: Falmouth.

  Google Scholar

• Breakthrough Plant. (2015) An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Breakthrough Institute.

• Carrington, C. (2016) The Anthropocene epoch: Scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age, The Guardian, 29th Baronial 2016.

• Castoriadis, C. (2007) Aeschylian anthropogony and sophoclean self-creation of anthropos. In: Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford: Stanford University Printing.

• Celermajer, D., Chatterjee, S., Cochrane, A., Fishel, South., Neimanis, A., O'Brien, A., et al. (2020) Justice through a multispecies lens. Contemporary Political Theory 19: 475–512.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.P. (1991) Cunning Intelligence in Greek Civilization and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Di Chiro, Thou. (2020) Mobilizing 'intersectionality' in environmental justice inquiry and action in a time of crunch. In D. Coolsaet (ed.) Environmental Justice: Central Problems. London: Routledge.

  Google Scholar

• Di Chiro, G. (2019) Care not growth: Imagining a subsistence economy for all. The British Periodical of Politics and International Relations 21(2): 303–311.

  Commodity  Google Scholar

• Dryzek, J.S. (2013) The The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261 pp. Usa $35.00 newspaper, ISBN 0-19-927739-7 . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Dryzek, J.S. and Pickering, J. (2019) The Politics of the Anthropocene. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

  Google Scholar

• Eckersley, R. (2017) Geopolitan commonwealth in the anthropocene. Political Studies 65: 983–999.

  Commodity  Google Scholar

• Fressoz, J.-B. (2021) Cascade une histoire des symbioses énergétiques et matérielles. Annales Des Mines - Responsabilitié & Environnement 101: vii–11.

  Commodity  Google Scholar

• Hamilton, C. (2013) Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Historic period of Climate Engineering. New Oasis, CT: Yale University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Haraway, D. (2015) Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities six: 159–165.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Hatzisavvidou, S. (2020) Inventing the environmental state: neoliberal mutual sense and the limits to transformation. Environmental Politics: beyond the Environmental Country? the Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation 29: 96–114.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Hickel, J. and Kallis, G. (2019) Is green growth possible? New Political Economy 25: 469–486.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Huesemann, M. and Huesemann, J. (2011) Technofix: Why Technology Won't Save Usa or the Environment. Gabriola Isle, BC: New Order Publishers.

  Google Scholar

• Jonas, H. (1984) The Imperative of Responsibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Printing.

  Google Scholar

• Kirk, G.S. (1974) The Nature of Greek Myths. London: Penguin.

  Google Scholar

• Lewis, K.J. (1992) Light-green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Lockwood, M. (2018) Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: Exploring the linkages. Environmental Politics 27: 712–732.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Malhi, Y. (2017) The concept of the anthropocene. Almanac Review of Environment and Resources 42: 77–104.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Marx, K. (1967) The difference between the democritean and gluttonous philosophy of nature. In Due north.D. Livergood (ed.) Activity in Marx'south Philosophy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhuff.

  Google Scholar

• MacGregor, Southward. (2020) Making matter great over again? Ecofeminism, new materialism and the everyday plow in ecology politics. Environmental Politics 30(ane–ii): 41–60.

  Google Scholar

• Meyer, Westward.B. (2016) The Progressive Environmental Prometheans: Left-Fly Heralds of a "Good Anthropocene." Basingstoke: Palgrave.

  Book  Google Scholar

• Moore, J.W. (ed.) (2016) Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

  Google Scholar

• Morozov, E. (2013) To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. Philadephia, PA: PublicAffairs.

  Google Scholar

• Nordmann, A. (2011) The age of technoscience. In A. Nordmann, H. Radder and G. Scheimann (eds.) Science Transformed: Debating Claims of an Epochal Pause. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

  Chapter  Google Scholar

• Plato. (1966) Protagoras. London: Penguin.

  Google Scholar

• Proudhon, P.J. (1972) System of Economical Contradictions. New York: Arno Press.

  Google Scholar

• Quadruppani, S. (2018) Le Monde des grands projets et ses ennemis. Paris: La Découverte.

  Google Scholar

• Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, G., Persson, A., Chapin, F.Due south., 3rd., Lambin, E.F., et al. (2009) A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461: 472–475.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Ross, K. (2018) Preface: Making a territory. In: Mauvaise Troupe Collective (ed.), The Zad and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence. London: Verso.

• Schlosberg, D. and Coles, R. (2015) The new environmentalism of everyday life: Sustainability, cloth flows and movements. Gimmicky Political Theory 15: 160–181.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Simon, J.L. (1981) The Ultimate Resources. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Academy Press.

  Google Scholar

• Soga, Thou. and Gaston, One thousand.J. (2018) Shifting baseline syndrome: Causes, consequences, and implications. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environs 16: 222–230.

  Article  Google Scholar

• Soper, Yard. (2016) Neither the "simple astern look" nor the "simple progressive thrust": Ecocriticism and the politics of prosperity. In M. Wednesday, G. Rippl and H. Zapf (eds.) Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Berlin: de Gruyter.

  Google Scholar

• Stengers, I. (2018) The challenge of ontological politics. In G. de la Cadena and Yard. Blaser (eds.) A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, Vol. ane: The Error of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Stiegler, B. (2017) Philosophising past Accident: Interviews with Elie During. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Google Scholar

• Svenning, J.-C. (2017) Future megafaunas: A historical perspective on the potential for a wilder anthropocene. In A.L. Tsing, H. Swanson, East. Gan and North. Bubandt (eds.) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Google Scholar

• Tsing, A.L. (2015) The Mushroom at the Terminate of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Backer Ruins. Princeton: Princeton Academy Press.

  Volume  Google Scholar

• Tsing, A.50. (2017) A threat to holocene resurgence is a threat to livability. In Thou. Brightman and J. Lewis (eds.) The Anthropology of Sustainability. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

  Google Scholar

• Uhall, Grand. (2021) Companion ecologies: A new theory of the subject Contemporary Political Theory, online get-go.

• Williams, A. and Srnicek, N. (2014) Accelerate: Manifesto for an accelerationist politics. In R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (eds.) Advance. Falmouth: Urbanomic.

  Google Scholar

Download references

Acknowledgements

Sophia Hatzisavvidou has received funding by the Leverhulme Trust under the Early Career Fellowship Scheme (Grant Number ECF 2016-230). A first version of this paper was presented at the University of Brighton (UK) in January 2019 at the conference 'Fascism? Populism? Democracy? Critical Theories in a Global Context' organised by the International Consortium for Disquisitional Theory (ICCT). The authors would like to thank the organisers of the conference, Volkan Çıdam, Marker Devenney, Zeynep Gambetti and Clare Woodford, too as the participants for their comments. Nosotros also give thanks George Sotiropoulos and Tara Puri for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of the article also as Andrew Schaap, and the three anonymous reviewers for their critical and detailed suggestions.

Author information

Affiliations

1. University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

   Benoit Dillet & Sophia Hatzisavvidou

Contributions

Benoit Dillet is lecturer in politics at the University of Bath. He is author The Political Space of Art (with T. Puri), and translator of Bernard Stiegler'south Philosophising by Accident: Interviews with Elie During. He has published on ontological politics and the politics of technology.

Sophia Hatzisavvidou is a senior lecturer in politics at the Academy of Bath. She has been awarded a Leverhulme early career fellowship to study the rhetorical evolution of eco-political discourse. She is the author of Appearances to Ethos in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield) and has published on ecological politics, political rhetoric, and social movements.

Corresponding writer

Correspondence to Benoit Dillet.

Boosted information

Publisher's Notation

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Nigh this article

Cite this article

Dillet, B., Hatzisavvidou, South. Across technofix: Thinking with Epimetheus in the anthropocene. Contemp Polit Theory (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00521-w

Download citation

• Accepted: thirteen August 2021

• Published: 09 September 2021

• DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00521-westward

Keywords

• Anthropocene
• Epimetheus
• Prometheanism
• Climate change
• Technology

smithpromild.blogspot.com

Source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-021-00521-w

Share this post