Keywords

Entropy … Again

Stiegler’s Neganthropocene narrative raises questions concerning The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which remains unresolved when it comes to issues of cosmology, quantum physics, and astrophysics. One way of approaching the various interpretations when facing the question of energy expenditure is related to the sun. Astrophysicists speak of a habitable zone (or Goldilock’s zone), which is the distance from a star where liquid water is likely to be found along with unknowable forms of life. When the sun begins its phase of heat death, approximately 5 billion years after the present, this spells the end of all species still inhabiting the planet Earth. The constant high-energy flux will have ended raising fundamental questions as the fate of Homo sapiens before then, a conversation that Lyotard (1991), among others, initiated. The sun’s thermonuclear fusion energy has been the source of important debates regarding its expenditure, which goes back to the metaphysical speculations of George Bataiile’s account of the ‘accursed share’ in relation to the ‘general economy’ (an economy that includes all energies humans exert in their lives). To recall the first chapter, Bataille provides an alternative position to Stiegler when it comes to tool use, as well as having more affinity with Simondon’s magic phase and aesthetics. Pithily put, ‘accursed share’ is an excessive part of any economy that is non-recuperable, spent on luxury, on the arts without gain (useless), non-procreative sexuality, spectacles, wars, and other destructive and ruinous acts. Excessive energy is central to Bataille’s theory, beginning with the superabundance of solar energy and surpluses that are produced through the basic chemical reactions of life itself. These surpluses can be used for an organism’s growth or, otherwise, by being lavishly expended. The ‘accursed share’ refers to the excess that is destined for waste, waste being identifiable with non-productivity and inefficiency. Waste is what progressively overwhelms the technosphere (Haff, 2013, p. 307). If energy and wealth cannot be reinvested in a system’s growth, then its excesses risk being spent on destructive initiatives such as wars, sexual practices, and religious sacrifices as forms of glory, as well as catastrophe.

The ‘accursed share’ has its entropic gambit as to how excessive non-productivity is to be spent. As David Wills (2017) makes the case, Bataille’s general economy problematizes a ‘restricted economy’; that is, an economy subject to the confines of the ‘home,’ ‘blood’ and ‘soil,’ where the usual understanding of ecology refers to an economy of purposes, usefulness, production, labor, constricting itself to conservation, and self-reproduction where family (blood, land) are primary in terms of oikos. This idea of interiority, however, cannot be maintained without regard to its surroundings, milieu, or environment. Calling on Derrida and Nancy, such auto-affection cannot be sustained. Speaking, singing, uttering that seemingly creates a self for the ‘house of sound,’ is a house that is already constantly penetrated. “Every auto-affection is … a hetero-affection: touching oneself means being touched—which always means being touched from the outside … and hearing oneself is a matter of being heard, from the outside” (p. 243). Derrida further maintains that this opens up the outside, which introduces the structure of the prosthesis. This is the point at which Stiegler develops his organological technology. Succinctly put, this means that social organs (organizations) and psychic organs (Homo sapiens) are always constituted by technical organs. However, the qualifying claim is that such technical organs are differentially integrated by social and psychic organs into more or less emancipatory and automating ways. Steigler skirts any strong accusations of technological determinism by maintaining the weaker notion of technical conditioning that takes place.

Wills (2017) makes the case that Bataille had already set the groundwork for such a position by maintaining that the house, in making contact with its inhabitant, determines it as a prosthetic to its supposed organic interior. The archaeological record already shows ‘sheltering walls’ made by the Australopithecines. There is no environment as a ‘denaturing of nature’ without the rupture of organicity. This opens the door to ‘tool use’ and the technoecological, that is an ‘exteriority’ in the strict sense of technics, which Stiegler exploits. Bataille, in Wills’ account, provides the rupture of the general economy within the restricted economy as heterogeneous within the homogeneous economy. Contact or contiguity with the outside is marked by contagion. Contagion opens the door to infectious, viral, and orgiastic transferences of affection and feelings. It is delocalizing and destabilizing, problematizing any ecological balance. Energy seems indiscriminately communicated throughout and in excess of any organic entity. During Bataille’s time, fascism became a communal fusion, a homogeneous, monolithic singularity in the figures of Mussolini and Hitler, not unlike in our present times in various degrees expressed in the fascist figures of Trump, Orban, Putin, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, and Narendra Modi, to name the most obvious, tethered all too obviously to ideals of blood and soil (MAGA, Zionism, Hungarian nationalism, the expansion of the Russian empire). In terms of Bataille’s concerns as to what happens to the ‘accursed share,’ with continued population growth that already has an extraordinary number of displaced peoples, refugees from wars and the like, fleeing to find peace and a new home. This situation can only result in wars as current expenditures are consistently going into arms, especially in countries such as the U.S., Israel, and Russia. As I write, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine occurred just under two years, having been invaded on February 24, 2022, while Israel’s ghettoization of the Palestinians resulted in a genocidal ‘war’ after a brutal attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

All this raises just what would it mean to become Earthbound as Latour hoped? COP 28 was held in the United Arab Emirates, where the primary takeaway was a payout of sorts: the Loss and Damage Fund, or more formally, The Green Climate Fund (GCF). To be cynical, a cartoon should be drawn to illustrate the rich countries dropping their ‘coin’ into a tin cup held out by those countries that are suffering the most from their pollution. However, it’s only a pledge. The coin may not rattle in the cup. An estimated 2500 fossil fuel lobbyists attended COP28, the most ever. No delegates complained about the accommodations and food in Dubai by such an oil-rich host. Should the closing rhetoric by Simon Steill, “it’s the ‘Beginning of the End’ of the Fossil Fuel Era,” be believed? Things will change only if less expensive energy is readily available, that is, if fusion power is made manageable, which is years away. This would mean a physics capable of harnessing the force of the sun. We are back to Bataille 2.0.

What are the hopes for the transformation toward a new earth if we see a retrenchment to the plurality of fascisms that have rooted themselves globally with the United Nations simply a tiger without teeth: lots of noise and protest? In this sense, Bataille’s account provides an important consideration for the post-Anthropocene era in terms of energy expenditure, especially ones that are ethically sound. Of particular interest are the tensions that emerge between a restricted economy and a general economy, where the stark difference is between energy and the economy. The global economy calculates energy according to scarcity and utility. It overlooks what Bataille so vividly illustrates as to what is done with the ‘accursed share’ once the pressure of growth cannot be maintained. This exposes the fundamental irony of OPEC members. Their expenditures on what at first appear to be impossible architectural feats, which now include Ski Dubai, an indoor ski resort in the Mall of the Emirates that is built in the middle of the desert; Qatar, which hosts the FIFA World Cup and builds stadiums at the expense of the death of hired workers; and Abu Dhabi, which hosts the Formula 1 circuit. The Emirates Golf Federation and the UAE Triathlon Federation can be added to this list.

The scholarly output of Jochem Zweir, Vincent Blok, and Pieter Lemmens (Zwier & Blok, 2020; Zwier et al., 2015; Blok, 2023c) attempts to draw on Batille’s insights into the post-Anthropocene. In particular, they show why the demand for an efficient ‘Bio-Based Economy’ (BBE) of zero waste that solar energy seems to promise simply repeats a scarcity economy where unbountiful solar energy once again becomes a commodity, a ‘good’ shaped by the need for maximum utility. What is abundant now becomes scarce. One hundred percent efficiency results in increasing energy accumulation and rising pressure (in Bataille’s terms) for expenditure. While this certainly results in growth, energy cannot regenerate and recirculate as BBE’s ‘ideal’ model demands. Because there can be no waste, the pressure of increased growth and space has to be applied, given that there is no recycling. In which way are they to be applied? BBE is perceived to be a desperate attempt to stave off what is happening in the context of the post-Anthropocene, as if waste would magically disappear through recycling. “[L]iving matter as constituted by energy and confined within a limited space responds to the sun‘s abundant and pressurizing gift by dissipation in the form of costliness and inefficiency” (Zwier et al., p. 362). This ‘natural cycle’ is hardly the same as human energy expenditure. This is precisely what is prevented in the BBE model, as there is no outlet for what cannot be recycled. Conceptually, Zweir and company (2015) posit the need for a ‘pressure valve.’ With abundance, waste and dissipation are necessary. However, what sort of waste where energy remains beneficial? They turn to art and its ‘ethics of passivity’—activities that reinvest in their products. This would serve as one possible way to release pressure in a positive way. I am reminded here that a certain percentage of the costs of urban buildings are set aside for art projects for both aesthetic and economic reasons. Zweir and company are raising the broader question as to what sort of ethics are needed if this ‘glorious’ expenditure—which is fundamentally ‘useless’ but paradoxically needed—is to assure that BBE can break with its closed circulatory system that repeats the misaligned relation between energy and the economy. This issue does not go away as Vincent Blok (2023c) reiterates the marketing aspects of BBE, and the continual need for technological innovation for one hundred percent efficiency, ignoring the ethics that surround the ‘accursed share.’ Roel Veraart et al. (2023), recalling Stiegler’s critique of the short circuits of desire, indicate that such short-sighted desire drives the BBE economy that currently supports ecomodernist tenants of a global capitalist economy where ‘sustainability’ has already been captured and perverted. Sustainability reiterates a general economy based on scarcity and utility. “The question is then whether it is possible to recondition libidinal structures via technology” (p. 17). The projection of a pharmacological ‘revolution of libidinal energy’ can be made only by querying the poison|cure actions along axiological lines. Its binary is held in a quantum superposition, ‘decohering’ with the situation at hand.

The idea that energy, as Bataille theorized it, sets in operation all processes and activities of life on the surface of the globe has been taken, perhaps to the extreme case, by Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan (2006). Their nonequilibrium thermodynamics build on Erwin Schrödinger, Alfred Lotka, Ilya Prigogine, and Jeffrey Wicken’s ‘thermodynamic imperative.’ They present the radical thesis that energy flows not only powered the evolutionary process but also organized it and defined its overall trajectory. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ‘rules’ the flow of life and defines its very purpose. It does so by abhorring gradients. A gradient is a physical quantity that sets the direction and rate that entropy (movement to disorder) takes. Life, they maintain, is causally subject to the reduction of energy gradients. This is the reduction of differences in intensity. The dissipation of intensities that are dispersed into degrees eliminates differences. As systems complexify, they reach a state of dispersion, producing entropy (disorder). End of story. The big picture is that the evolution of organic life on planet Earth feeds on the ultimate gradient, which is the surface temperature of the Sun that enables life’s complexifying tendency. As complexity increases, the potential of living organisms and ecosystems to produce entropy through the elimination of gradients increases. In this narrative, the intelligence of life via increased complexification is achieved by using increasingly more efficient gradient reduction and by using this gradient reduction for energy gain (i.e., usable potential energy). A problem with this reasoning is that no comparison of entropic degradation can be made. The context and the system are crucial. Specifically, how is the measurement of entropy taken? Any measurement is insignificant, for instance, on the scale of the universe. Calculations are macro rather than micro and tend toward inaccuracy.

With Schneider and Sagan’s account, it could be said that the Second Law of Thermodynamics ends up as a “naturalistic teleology” where the vitalism of life pervades the entire planetary system: ‘sun worship’ ends up as the externalized symbolism of this abundance. Against this teleology where nature’s (or the universe) purpose or intent is to achieve this outcome of ‘heat death’ (complete entropy), which is the corollary to the Second Law, teleonomy is the evolved internal goal of survival and reproduction of living things that is contingent on the environment. This amounts to Spinozian ‘conatus,’ the striving of each entity to persist. This is quite different from the claim that the purpose of life is to degrade energy gradients whose organization is ill-defined to begin with. As other commentators on their thesis note, the force of gravity, which is an anti-entropic influence, is not considered. This correlation has remained one of debate in regard to the genesis of the universe, which began with a low entropy state (e.g., Lineweaver & Egan, 2008). In relation to the technosphere as a geothermodynamic process, Peter Haff’s (2013) position is that it will continue to use up the available potential energy through gradient reduction as a semi-autonomous system where full human control is not possible. Humans are entrained in this teleological direction to a point that confronts the ‘principle of maximum entropy production principle’ (MEPP); that is, the never-to-be-reached point of complete perfect equilibrium, which is to say complete or infinite dispersion that takes us back to the impossible origin of Big Bang cosmology.

Technosphere Tensions

Stiegler’s proposal does not engage with the future event of the sun’s death. His proposal is more immediate given the earth’s phase change and the obvious impact on this through the energy expenditures that contribute to its dramatic climactic changes. Stiegler seeks a ‘neganthropic’ future in conjunction with a negentropic future for a fundamental change given the present condition of the post-Anthropocene. Anthropy and neganthropy are the neologisms he uses for the struggle against the entropy that human organisms face; that is, the universal tendency of the physical cosmos toward increasing disorder, decay, and eventual death. ‘Negentropic organogenesis,’ understood as psycho-social processes of individuation (following Simondon), presents a pharmacological intent to increase negentropy by way of exosomatization, understood as technology of technical artifacts or tertiary retentions, which is said to produce noetic knowledge in all forms that increase and lengthen circuits of desire (to know, to attend to, and to care). Exosomatization (a term first used by Alfred Lotka) is the constitution of objects that are theoretically analogous to organs outside organic bodies. The projectory of exomatization, however, can be questioned, as Mark Hansen (2015) does, when twenty-first century technologies are no longer prosthetic in Steiger’s or Derrida’s sense. Prosthetics, in their case, is what media take away from the human body–mind and give back in the form of a prosthetic extension. However, Hansen’s argument is: when human behavior becomes accessible, technically generated data cannot be directly experienced, prosthetic pharmacology undergoes a fundamental transformation. It loses its prosthetic basis. The control over our own behavioral data is lost. The recompensation of earlier technological forms now becomes something that has no direct compensatory correlation. The shift is toward the affordances of social media in the twenty-first century, which, as many have argued, are an extraction of ‘data-value’ in the form of user profiles sold as commodities for marketing purposes. This ‘feed-forward’ system has a different time structure than the one theorized by Steigler. Learning machines now feed off of Stiegler’s tertiary retentions (epiphylogenetic memory). Exteriorized memory—as inscribed in material forms, primarily as archives consisting of databases, networks, and recording devices used in the past to transmit knowledge and affect across space and time—have become learning sets for inclusion in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Pieter Lemmens (2022a) argues that the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts emerge from what is more commonly known as the technosphere as chartered by Benjamin Bratton’s (2016) ‘the stack.’ In this account, Stiegler’s exosomatization now becomes an exteriorized and elaborate form of phenomenology. In the empiricism of postphenomenology (by Don Idhe and Peter-Paul Verbeek), where the impact of this broader technosphere is not a significant factor, emphasis is placed on the local use of technology in everyday life. The tension between macro and micro technologies becomes more visible, as does the energy exchanges that occur in what seem to be parallel universes.

This transcendental operativity of technology, its persistent global homogenization through capitalist means, has evolved into a technosphere, as articulated in a series of articles by Peter Haff (2017). The technosphere, as a planetary ‘enframing,’ occurs along with the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the lithosphere, and the biosphere, all of which are interrelated dynamic systems whose energy comes from the sun. The technosphere has become a geological source in entropic terms. Haff (2013) summarizes this phenomenon as follows: “The technosphere thus exhibits a number of properties of earlier geological paradigms. It is autonomous. It is a global phenomenon. It appropriates Earth resources, including energy, mass and information, for its own use on a large scale” (p. 307). The technosphere does little recycling, without which, Hass claims, the future is questionable. Energy demands will increase by the world’s energy-poor humans, as will the energy required to recycle metabolic waste products that will be generated by an increasing energy-consuming population. This situation provides additional insight into why the idealism of BBE (i.e., zero emissions) has had so much support and is so pressingly urgent.

Haff (2014) has gone on to query the Maximum Entropy Production (MaxEP) of the technosphere; however, the energy efficiency and energy consumption by the technosphere remain open and only suggestive. The biological (life) aspects of entropy are poorly understood and complicated even further by what Rachel Armstrong (2019) has brilliantly developed, called “liquid life,” which also deals with nonlinear material systems and confusions in entropy, as sunlight does not come into play. Liquid life again perplexes any macro-accounting of energy exchanges. There is an important discussion on entropy in the first chapter of Bifurcate: There is no Alternative, by Maël Montévil et al. (2021; also, Angelini, 2022). In their section on entropy, an attempt is made to clarify their position on thermodynamics in the Anthropocene that addresses ‘biological situations.’ These are far-from-thermodynamic equilibrium states that do not tend toward maximum entropy thwarting the second law. However, the term “negentropy” is also not precise enough to determine the entropic exchange of these biological organizations. The range of temperatures used for biological organization is always a condition, as is the range of functional parts of biological organizations, which require a local increase in entropy to maintain functionality. Exchanges with the environment are—put bluntly—complex, as the historicity of biological organizations is also a factor (the way they have adapted and modified their environments and continue to do so). At the quantum level, this phenomenon becomes more confusing as entanglement, particle superposition, and black hole information paradox come into play. Issues concerning Von Neumann entropy in relation to Shannon’s information entropy present more obstacles in articulating just how a system’s entropy can be grasped.

What this bloc of mathematicians proposed was what they called “anti-entropy,” a concept complementary to entropy and negentropy. As briefly mentioned in the last chapter, this often causes confusion with Stiegler’s work, where negentropy is the dominant concept applied throughout his Neganthopocene thesis. The term “anti-entropy” refers to the process through which living organisms produce entropy. They transform energy by renewing their organization continually through the generation of novelty. Functional novelties that appear in the past and in the future are said to be unpredictable and an unprestatable a priori. This notion of unprestatable vivifies the non-calculability of life (see Kauffman, 2013). Anti-entropy amounts to the singularity of the local. For humans, this includes the interrelations of the technosphere (inorganic objects) with the noosphere, with the biosphere, and so on; that is, exosomatization. The question of exosomatic novelties, however, remains as they are unpredictable events (such as the introduction of human rights, which is unprecedented, or the concept of inertia when it to comes to movement). These are aspects of human creation beyond ‘data’ banks available to the ChatGPT. The way entropy is understood in Stiegler’s project remains an open question. Can Stiegler’s ‘general organology’ (configured relations between psychosomatic organs, technical systems, and constituted social organizations) come to terms with Bataille’s ‘general economy,’ for instance? The metabolic subjectivity of libidinal energy (knowledge, desire, attention, care) is what has been hijacked; that much is obvious. There is also tension between the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts and the creation of novelty at the local level. That too seems plausible. The irony is that the human creation of novelty ends up as a planetary enframing of the technosphere. What is open then closes in a never-ending game.

Should the shift be toward socio-therapies and practices that rework the noosphere? For Pieter Lemmens, who embraces Stiegler’s project, it is obvious that the Anthropocene has to be turned into an ‘entropocene’ as Stieger would have it, a ‘negentropic turn,’ all well and good, but one that simply avoids platitudes? Lemmens (2018, 2021) calls upon Peter Sloterdijk’s (2017) homeotechnological turn, which is yet another Heideggerian reworking, Germanic to its core, as one answer to a renewed noosphere. This approach also seems to support the theoretical learning of Yuk Hui (Lemmens & Hui, 2017), who draws heavily from these same Heideggerian sources but compares them to his own Chinese roots to project his version of cosmotechnics. Most of what can be done and should be done rests as projections. Local specifies, which are called for (especially by Hui), are difficult to find. These local specificities then enter the technosphere to be made (potentially) globally available. in this view, technological systems begin to function as ‘immune systems’ that regulate and control social and biological processes through security and surveillance to maintain order and stability.

Lemmens (2022b) provides a very good summary of his position when he reviews what he takes to be four dominant Anthropocene narratives: a naturalist narrative (Earth system management), eco-modernists (Breakthrough Institute and the Long Now Foundation), eco-catastrophists, and eco-Marxists. From these limitations, he looks at the continental thinkers of technology: Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Bernard Stiegler, and Frédéric Neyrat, who is the most recent theorist Lemmens includes in his broad framework. Most of what Lemmens develops is a rehearsal of previous articles, except for Neyrat’s (2019) departure in theorizing a ‘separation’ between nature and culture, a certain distancing that does not do away with nature. The interconnectedness of things is suffocating, promoting the need for an ‘ecology of separation.’ Neyrat’s stance is a reminder of the double-edged sword of nature itself: creatively destructive (the unresolvable tension between natura naturans and natura naturata). This speaks more to the posture of Deleuze|Guattari. The Earth is always deterritorializing itself and always ‘becoming.’ Earth for Neyrat is a ‘traject’ in the solar system, much more consonant with Lyotardian thinking regarding the death of the sun. In closing his overview, Lemmens returns back to his technosphere, where Peter Haff is (once more) given credit but chastised for his physicalist approach to the technosphere without the recognition of the importance of the noosphere. This exemplifies the tension mentioned above: between the transcendental technosphere and the potential for creativity by the noosphere, what Stiegler identifies as noetic différance. When the thermodynamic question is raised (pp. 232–233), Lemmens has no place to go except to rehearse Haff’s own assessment that waste is the key issue when it comes to the technosphere. The ‘solution’ is a more efficient technology that requires an increase in energy to address this issue. Given the discussion that Lemmens took part concerning the merits of BBE (Zwier et al., 2015), the entropic questions remain unresolved.

The ‘evolution’ of the technosphere is somewhat puzzling. There is a dynamic that inheres in technical artifacts. Many commentators rely on Gillbert Simondon’s (2017) account, especially Stiegler (1998, pp. 66–67), as to its quasi-autonomous progress where constraints of design are encountered but surpassed by human ingenuity through the process of concretization (p. 68) as a ‘mode of existence.’ It seems that the nuance between humans not being intentional actors in this process but only the operators of such a process is somewhat misleading, as this process of ‘individuation’ results in mutual modification. However, once a technology is established, it does take on autonomy as to its function as it becomes life-giving. The electric grid is an obvious example. Any malfunctioning causes great alarm, and there are many protocols available to protect against this. There does not seem to be much discussion of the importance of a multiplier effect that happens through human ingenuity when the so-called laws of physics are somewhat ‘magically’ overcome, such as air travel as the realization of a mechanically animated ‘flying carpet.’ I don’t see Stiegler recognizing more forcefully the paradigm shifts in energy that happen when water, air, animals, and fossil fuels are harnessed that can be considered negentropic in their effects. While each development is limited and its ‘waste’ effects must be addressed (i.e., storage of nuclear radium waste), there is also hope for fusion energy to come, which once more harnesses a multiplier effect from the sun. While Stiegler sees technology as compensation for an ‘original default’ that sets the modification of our species as an open-ended ‘becoming’, the physiological and epigenetic changes since Paleolithic times and before are poorly understood and occur only through speculation. Technological limitations constantly emerge in the process of concretization. Anthropogenesis as technogenesis as a coevolutionary development never escapes the noospehere in this regard. How could it? Here, current twenty-first century technological developments far exceed Stiegler’s tertiary retentions.

Heidegger Again?

In addition to Pieter Lemmens (along with Yuk Hui), there is a further bloc of Dutch philosophers, Jochem Zweir and Vincent Blok, who all seem to be of one mind in recalling Heidegger’s position on technology and the Earth (his ‘fourfold’) as a source of rethinking the Anthropocene. Blok (2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2020, 2022, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c) is perhaps the most ardent of the three in this task, attempting to modify Heidegger’s position to rethink the Earth. Blok’s (2017) particular emphasis is to maintain that being-in-the-Anthropocene requires a restatement of the relation between the World and Earth by reintroducing the Heideggerian existential notion of Dasein as being-in-the-world. In this sense, he rejects Timothy Morton’s (2017) emphasis of doing away with ‘world.’ Morton’s ‘enmeshment’ hypothesis problematizes the loss of the self; his claim that objects are now ‘in our face.’ Ecology as we know it was once simply unnoticed ‘background’, but now (as Earth) it collapses on us and does away with our common ‘natural’ grasp of the World. Blok also rejects Graham Harman’s rereading of Heidegger’s well-known distinction between ‘readiness-to-hand’ and ‘present-at-hand.’ He does the same concerning Stielger’s account of claiming Heidegger’s failure to deal with entropy and negentropy (Blok, 2022). Blok’s defense here is that Heidegger had already properly theorized this. The strife lies between negentropy as ‘unconcealing’ (World) and entropy as concealing (Earth). However, concessions are given. Heidegger conceptualizes Earth from the perspective of the World. Earth and World are key concepts for Blok for a post-Heideggerian position, as discussed below.

Blok (2023a) provides a comprehensive and personal view of his position, wherein he reaffirms his commitment to the distinction between Earth and World, where the former rescinds the latter in two senses. First, Earth has an asymmetrical relationship to the World where geological global disasters are inevitable, and second, the World is always already embodied in the Earth. Blok presents this relationship dangerously close to becoming a correlational dichotomy, as I read it. The World is an interiorization, while the Earth is an exteriorization. How these both play out with one another often runs the risk of confusion in this particular work. The Anthropocene World is said to interiorize the Earth, which now cannot be ignored. It obviously intrudes. In the Holocene World, the claim is made that the Earth is viewed as ‘stable.’ I assume that Blok means that the cycles of the Earth appear regular within a range that denotes stability where deviations as highs and lows are simply extraordinary events that need to be endured. When he addresses ‘spaceship Earth,’ which conceptualizes the technological control of the Earth, he claims that this exterior World disappears. The collapse of Earth and World in this scenario exemplifies the Anthropocene World. Seems difficult to grasp why it becomes so one-sided in this reading where the physics of the Earth is turned into a ‘spaceship’ that must be engaged with technically. A one-sided Anthropocene World places all the interest on ‘saving’ humanity by ‘saving the Earth,’ as an extreme position where the fantasy is one of extending the Holocene indefinitely as if the Earth could be controlled. An asymmetrical relationship with the Earth, with which I agree, means that the symbiotic ideal with nonhumans remains tarnished. No one escapes the difficult choices of the negotiations that take place between Earth and World.

Blok recognizes Earth’s indifference to human existence. Its deep history, enabling human existence to evolve and have a World—the contingency of Earth’s givenness—is a position I also agree with. It is developed in the last chapter of this second volume. The ontological condition of the Anthropocene is a recognition of the contingency and finitude of the givenness of this condition. Such being-toward-death, as developed in the introduction of Volume 1, amounts to our species’ inability to comprehend or theorize our extinction. It just can’t happen, like the fish in the tank that disregard its rising temperature. Whether this givenness of the World was ever ‘stable’ as Blok argues, as was the case with the Holocene—it seems to me that precariousness and vulnerability to life were always persistent threats for survival—there is no doubt that this precarity with the Earth has intensified, which rings true of Morton’s metaphorical image, “it’s in your face.” The idea of the Earth–World as an ontic-ontological condition rings true. For Blok to say that the Earth is the origin or ground of the World, but then to deny that this Earth is not produced or the cause of the World is questionable. Although it is not the efficient cause of the World, as he argues, the Earth is certainly a quasi-cause. In addition, while the Earth is not the formal or final cause of the World as Bok further argues (Homo sapiens will undoubtedly be ‘replaced’ when we go extinct), it is certainly the case that the global perception is that the Earth needs to be ‘saved’ to continue the illusion that this is indeed its teleology; namely, to keep us alive as ‘parasites’ living on and with it. This again staves off the very idea of extinction. ‘Saving’ the Earth is conflated with ‘saving’ the World. In this scenario, the usual tropes come into play (Great Mother, Earth Mother, Giver of Life), which perceives the Earth as a plentiful, holistic source of energy.

Blok has a tendency to mix up Earth and World to the point where his stance on their relationship becomes confusing. Or, at least I found it so. It amounts to a gestalt switch of figure|ground. The World is figure as the Earth is ground. The World switches from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, a rather dubious analogy as if the Earth in this switch remains unchanged. Ideally, it would be impossible for such an analogy to occur at all because the dynamics between Earth and World have been in constant flux since the advent of our species. The more pressing idea would be speculative articulations of those critical events, which are not simply flips with the Earth’s materiality remaining indifferent (it is not a ‘material cause of the World’ for Blok, 2023a, p. 12); rather, it is precisely how the material of the Earth comes to penetrate the World, which is always the issue, a both|and logic that the gestalt switch harbors but remains hidden, a superposition of the two. Agreed, the Earth is certainly ‘indifferent,’ but that indifference becomes ‘expressed’ through dramatic climate change and the difficulty of finding a renewed World. There is something flawed with Bok’s articulation. He seems to forget the anthropogenic work directed at and on the Earth, despite recognizing its force? Blok talks of the necessity for the production of a post-Anthropocene. This is the period in which we are already embedded; the gestalt flip has already happened; and the awareness that the Anthropocene event has taken place is agreed upon by a host of scientists. The dispute as to its origins will always be contested (in Blok’s case, this is taken to be the steam engine).

To this end, Blok attempts to present an emancipatory technology for such a period as a postphase (2023b). In this work, Blok becomes less convinced of Heidegger’s contribution to the question of technology (p. 999) and retracts his earlier remarks that the strife between entropy and negentropy amounts to Heidegger’s conception of truth as veiling and unveiling (Blok 2022). However, at the same time, he is unable to fully let go; so much has already been invested in a Heideggerian account of tool use. Excuses continue to be made. The strife between negentropy and entropy is (finally?) understood as a question of a multiplier effect of energy (understood by his reading of the dynamics of the steam engine that started the industrial revolution by harnessing water in a new way). Blok uses the awkward phrase “coverted coverter” for the multiplier effects of harnessing energy via technological inventions. It is recognition that creativity, as Deleuze maintains, is also a destructive force, as a new ontological World is ushered in, not always for the better, precisely why the present period of the post-Anthropocene is a debate as to the directions that need to be taken in the ontic-ontological mix. In the last section, Blok pitches what might be considered as obvious: the continued creative search for innovative technologies that would further an emancipatory progressive movement to abate the effects of climate change.

Martin Ritter (2023) provides a useful review of Blok’s position, arguing that both Zweir and Blok (2017) take the position that the Earth can be ‘saved.’ For Blok (2016b), saving the planet is a turn to the best that biomimesis has to offer. (This is a direction that I also look at the end of this volume, as it offers a pedagogy of design.) Heidegger’s Earth–World relation remains problematic and raises the question as to whether it is worth resurrecting Heideggerian ontology to rethink the post-Anthropocene era. This vector undertaken by the writings of Zweir and Blok ends up in the same morass that Jane Sholtz’s (2015) important comparative study of Heidegger and Deleuze (Guattari) has shown with regard to conceptualizing the Earth and World. The core of the Heidegger–Deleuze relationship is summed up by Deleuze and Guattari (1994): “He got the wrong people, earth, and blood” (pp. 108–109). In brief, Heidegger’s ontology is flawed. He cannot escape the charge of racism and his involvement with fascism. The “homology between Being and beings” (p. 218) is maintained as politics is drawn from the ontological realm wherein difference and identity remain. Ontological priority is given over to unity and the one. Dasein is understood in “terms of wholeness and plenitude.” For instance, Geschlecht with Heidegger takes on a multiplicity of meanings (sex, genre, family, stock, race, lineage, and generation) in relation to a place or site (Ort). As Scholtz notes, each of these terms has been exclusionary in their force, based on the criteria of similarity. Nominal differences are allowed, but Geschlecht cannot be defined as difference. It remains a ‘neural’ term that is to be mobilized ontically. The ontological condition of Dasein is flawed. When applied to the notion of people, “the unity of difference” amounts to a form of “metaphysical racism” (p. 219) that does away with the possibility of divergence and difference. Deleuze calls on the virtual realm for difference itself. There is a fundamental break here that should remain a lesson for environmental educators who follow this path. Do we need Heidegger … yet again?