This paper establishes silence as an ethical-political response to the Anthropocene. Silence, in this paper, is key to the making of commons, which frames the reinvention of ways of living and relating as a necessary response to the Anthropocene moment. Drawing from and intervening in autonomist Marxist debates on communicative labour, recent interdisciplinary work on Anthropocene ecologies and writing on the violences of ongoing colonialism, it shows how silence in its diverse forms can be used to expand what commons might mean, and what they might come to do in the present era. Mindful of the ambivalences of silence, it contends that the tensions inherent to its politics foster the suspension of assertions on how the world is, or how it should be. In this way, silence is argued as crucial to making spaces in which the proliferation of different ways of being can occur, and from within which resistance against forms of cognitive capitalism, neocolonialism and the ecological destruction of the earth can take place.

The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.

Much has been made of the claim that humanity has ascended to the status of a terrestrial force and inaugurated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. While attention has been paid to the contestable nature of the epoch and its disputed histories, insufficient attention has been paid to the significance of the Anthropocene for political praxis. Contrary to much Anthropocenic discourse that articulates a renewed sense of mastery over nature through assertions of humanity's complete subsumption of the environment, recent work in both science and technology studies and human geography suggests an alternate reading of the Anthropocene as an epoch without mastery, one where humanity exists in a permanent state of vulnerability. The political significance of this state of vulnerability is explored through a reading of popular TV show The Walking Dead, a post-collapse narrative of a world in ruins and overrun by zombies. On a ruined earth, political praxis is orientated not towards a return of the earth to its previous productive state, but rather as an unending labour of survival and salvage. Survival is not a life reduced to bare life, but rather a state of tension between a life reduced to necessity, and the refusal to separate the question of how to live from the work of securing life itself. Left unresolved, this tension animates the politics of the Anthropocene, suggesting that in place of the teleology of progress social life is organised within it through unceasing care and repair time.

The only existing plans to arrest dangerous climate change depend on either yet to be invented technologies to keep us below 2°C or on crashing the world economy for decades to come. The political choice appears to be between doing what is scientifically necessary or what is politically realistic; between shifting to an entirely different kind of global socio-economic system or suffering catastrophe. We are thus in a moment of governmental impasse, caught between old and still-emerging political rationalities. Working through the liminal governmental role of environmental non-governmental organisations, this paper explores the shift from governmental regimes centred on biopower to ones that work through the register of geopower, from governing life to governing the conditions of life. Confronted with climate change as an irresolvable problem, what we find emerging are techniques that aim to contain the worst effects of climate change without fundamentally transforming the global economy.

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