I am uncertain, but We are not: a new subjectivity of the Anthropocene
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The concept of ‘the Anthropocene’ as a new human-induced geological epoch has made its way into IR. Debates have recently arisen between ‘post-humanists’ stressing its destruction of subject-object binaries and ‘New Anthropocentrists’ arguing that it increases the importance of the human being as planetary steward. This article moves beyond these debates to question a strange but unexplored foundation that underlies the basic discourse of the Anthropocene: the assertion that humanity must be grouped together as a collective species, ‘anthropos’, or planetary ‘We’. Using the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, it argues that the Anthropocene reveals a new and deeper shift in human subjectivity, moving from an individualistic Cartesian ‘I’ to a collective and planetary ‘We’. This argument is made in three steps. First, today's common treatment of humanity as a collective whole in Anthropocene literature is examined. Second, it details how transformations in subjectivity occur by shifting the historical boundaries of our most fundamental notion of certainty – the ‘subiectum’ – and how the technologies of Earth System Science (ESS) subtly facilitate this shift today. Finally, the article argues how this subjective transformation from the ‘I’ to the ‘We’ results from the temporal, spatial, and existential incalculability and uncertainty of the Anthropocene, thereby fostering the rise of certainty in new forms of conflictual identity politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".