SAQ 116:2 • April 2017 The South Atlantic Autonomia in the Anthropocene Quarterly Bruce Braun and Sara Nelson, Special Issue Editors Autonomia in the Anthropocene: SAQ New Challenges to Radical Politics Sara Nelson and Bruce Braun Species, Nature, and the Politics of the Common: 116:2 From Virno to Simondon Miriam Tola • April Anthropocene and Anthropogenesis: Philosophical Anthropology 2017 and the Ends of Man Jason Read At the Limits of Species Being: Anthropocene Autonomia and the Sensing the Anthropocene Elizabeth R. Johnson The Ends of Humans: Anthropocene, Autonomism, Antagonism, and the Illusions of our Epoch Elizabeth A. Povinelli The Automaton of the Anthropocene: On Carbosilicon Machines and Cyberfossil Capital Matteo Pasquinelli Intermittent Grids Karen Pinkus Autonomia Anthropocene: Cover: Anthropocene, Victims, Narrators, and Revolutionaries underwater sculpture, Marco Armiero and Massimo De Angelis depth 8m, MUSA Collection, in the Anthropocene Cancun/Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Special Issue Editors Refusing the World: © Jason deCaires Taylor. Silence, Commoning, All rights reserved, Bruce Braun and Sara Nelson and the Anthropocene DACS / ARS 2017 Anja Kanngieser and Nicholas Beuret Autonomy and the Intrusion of Gaia Duke Isabelle Stengers AGAINST the DAY • Pipeline Politics Editor Michael Hardt Editorial Board Srinivas Aravamudan Rey Chow Roberto M. Dainotto Fredric Jameson Ranjana Khanna The South Atlantic Wahneema Lubiano Quarterly was founded in 1901 by Walter D. Mignolo John Spencer Bassett. Kenneth Surin Kathi Weeks Robyn Wiegman Managing Editor Stacy Lavin Correspondence may be sent to the South Atlantic Quarterly, Box 90660, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0660. Special issue proposals are welcome. Copyright © 2017 by Duke University Press 0038-2876 The South Atlantic Quarterly SAQ 116:2 • April 2017 Autonomia in the Anthropocene Bruce Braun and Sara Nelson, Special Issue Editors Autonomia in the Anthropocene: New Challenges to Radical Politics 223 Sara Nelson and Bruce Braun Species, Nature, and the Politics of the Common: From Virno to Simondon 237 Miriam Tola Anthropocene and Anthropogenesis: Philosophical Anthropology and the Ends of Man 257 Jason Read At the Limits of Species Being: Sensing the Anthropocene 275 Elizabeth R. Johnson The Ends of Humans: Anthropocene, Autonomism, Antagonism, and the Illusions of our Epoch 293 Elizabeth A. Povinelli The Automaton of the Anthropocene: On Carbosilicon Machines and Cyberfossil Capital 311 Matteo Pasquinelli Intermittent Grids 327 Karen Pinkus Anthropocene: Victims, Narrators, and Revolutionaries 345 Marco Armiero and Massimo De Angelis Refusing the World: Silence, Commoning, and the Anthropocene 363 Anja Kanngieser and Nicholas Beuret Autonomy and the Intrusion of Gaia 381 Isabelle Stengers ii The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2017 AGAINST the D AY Pipeline Politics Imre Szeman, Editor Introduction: Pipeline Politics 402 Imre Szeman The Borders Beneath: On Pipelines and Resource Sovereignty 408 Rachel Havrelock After the Pipelines: Energy and the Flow of War in the Persian Gulf 417 Toby Craig Jones What Can Art Do about Pipeline Politics? 426 Brian Holmes Pipeline Politics in Iran: Power and Property, Dispossession and Distribution 432 Kaveh Ehsani Notes on Contributors 440 Sara Nelson and Bruce Braun Autonomia in the Anthropocene: New Challenges to Radical Politics The theoretical innovations that emerged out of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s have enjoyed a striking revival in Anglophone critical scholarship in the past two decades, informing a generation of political activism that erupted in force with the alter-globalization move- ments of the late 1990s. In the midst of the “Ital- ian miracle” of industrial growth following the country’s postwar devastation, a broad-based movement of workers, students, and intellectuals refused capital’s “gift” of work (Tronti 2007) and advanced a politics of self-determination and self- valorization outside of state and party politics. Autonomia, Italian for autonomy, referred both to the ontological priority of labor power vis-à-vis capital and to a rejection of the bureaucratic poli- tics of compromise characteristic of the establish- ment Left.1 Among the movement’s ongoing lega- cies is a vibrant intellectual tradition that has transformed established categories of Marxist analysis to contend with the changing political terrain that accompanied the rise of what is now referred to as a post-Fordist mode of production. Along with Latin American and indigenous anti- colonial movements, Autonomia forms one of sev- eral intellectual undercurrents nourishing the The South Atlantic Quarterly 116:2, April 2017 10.1215/00382876-3829368 © 2017 Duke University Press 224 The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2017 turn toward direct, horizontal democratic organization outside of the repre- sentative structures of electoral politics and oriented toward a horizon of liberation. Despite Autonomia’s widespread inuence on political action and post- Marxist scholarship, it has been surprisingly slow to address planetary change and environmental politics. With a focus on cognitive capitalism, many autonomist scholars have downplayed or fully ignored the ecological dimensions of post-Fordism—its foundations in extractive energy econo- mies, its links to the accelerating nancialization of nature under the banner of so-called green capitalism, its harnessing of nonhuman capacities, and its wildly uneven toxic geographies. This lack of engagement is regrettable given that, we propose, autonomist insights hold great promise for under- standing both the transformed relation between capital and nonhuman natures in post-Fordism and the many political movements that have emerged in response. More signicantly, the era of anthropogenic global change named by the Anthropocene poses profound challenges to a politics of autonomy in the present. The nomination of the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch shines a spotlight on the immense scale and consequence of human transforma- tions of earth systems. These changes cannot be undone; we have produced a new nature and a new humanity, the contours of which we are still discern- ing. That responsibility for these transformations is uneven has been widely noted, and other names—Capitalocene, Plantationocene—have been pro- posed to identify specic social actors and forces that have brought us to the present juncture. These names matter, but none of them alter a key point: we may now be geological actors, but that has only further revealed our entanglement with the nonhuman world, the impossibility of separating the anthropos from geology, ecology, and climate. In the context of these entan- glements it is not clear what autonomy means, politically or ontologically. Indeed, even as the gure of the human is inated in some Anthropocene narratives, it has been radically decentered in others, as inhuman materiali- ties, temporalities, and genealogies come to the fore that precede, exceed, and subtend human life. “Considering the human within geologic time,” Kathryn Yuso (2015: 388) writes, “poses the problem of thinking an inhuman milieu, both before, after and internal to ‘us’” (italics added). Placed alongside recog- nition of the consequences of anthropogenic change, this displacement of the human demands that “life” be understood not in terms of humanity as a uni- ed category but in terms of what Elizabeth A. Povinelli (this issue) describes as “more or less densely compacted forms and modes of existence” that nei- Nelson and Braun • Autonomia in the Anthropocene 225 ther begin nor end with “us,” with consequences not just for the most hubris- tic fantasies of geoengineering but also for what constitutes the common, where and in what potentiality is located, how autonomy should be under- stood, and who and what is named by the anthropos. It is no longer evident that key terms found in the autonomist lexicon— species being, the common, multitude, potentia—survive the challenge of the Anthropocene unchanged or that the production of subjectivity (a cornerstone of autonomist thought) can be understood solely in terms of language, habit, or gesture. It may therefore be necessary to think beyond the struggles of the factory oor, or those of the cognitariat today, to imagine and think from other sites of struggle, other forms of solidarity, and other experiments in “com- moning.” These bring into play unfamiliar actors and unacknowledged geog- raphies: sites of extraction and circuits of waste, indigenous communities and territories, rising seas and toxic landscapes that are materially present within the informationalized economies of global capitalism, but often invisible to those working within them. We might say, then, that the Anthropocene names autonomist Marxism’s unthought, an unthought that intrudes on its political imaginaries. What happens to autonomism if it begins to question the auton- omy of the human? Or if it leaves its privileged sites in the global North? And what does it mean, in the context of cognitive capitalism’s toxic ecologies, to advance a politics based on the progressive expansion of human productive capacities? Might we be compelled to recognize, as Isabelle Stengers (this issue) forcefully asserts, that capitalism may lead only to catastrophe and bar- barism? In sum, the conjuncture named by the Anthropocene would seem to push Autonomia to its conceptual and political limits. Yet if the Anthropocene describes a blindness in autonomist thought and politics, it