A reader writes:
"Neither the Cenozoic nor any of its formally recognized epochs are named after a species, a geological force or an event. They are all named after faunal composition."
Precisely. There are logical and epistemological problems with such classifications, as geologists (with whom I've spoken) have observed. These have to do with the (false) conception of time as a linear series of now-points.
The fault the reader observes is in fact a virtue. It would be better to name periods along the lines of the Anthropaocene, as I've argued at Chicago (talk mp3 posted here). This is because geological/ecological time is a series of concentric temporalities whose boundaries are catastrophes, such as oxygen (the "Bacteriocene").
1 comment:
But don't you find it interesting that no one is proposing to go back and rename the OTHER geological times? That the Anthropocene (if it is formally approved) will be the only anomaly?
Does this not seem to repeat, with utter predictability, one of the most traditional gestures of western philosophy and culture: that humans are the great anomaly? On virtually any axis you can imagine, it seems always in the West that "nature" falls one side and humans the other. We are always the anomaly.
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