Abstract
Despite meager attention to the climate crisis amidst geopolitical crises on a historical scale, the climate catastrophe is unfolding. Unprecedented ecological calamities not only threaten the continued existence of our species and other lifeforms but also outrun our conceptual vocabulary to understand what renders global warming, droughts, and floods such powerful circumstances and events. And even if we humans were not in imminent threat due to ecological collapse and other unforeseen crises, our traditional ways of thinking still get something fundamentally wrong about how nonhuman matter and life shape society in powerful ways. It is the former thesis about the unfolding yet ill-understood ecological catastrophe that lends urgency to Lars Tønder’s new book Power in the Anthropocene, while the claim that received modes of thought have been, for a long time, deeply flawed with respect to our relationship to nature frames the depth of his substantial argument.
Tønder’s argument, which he develops in close dialogue with new materialist and other ecological strands in political and social theory, is that we need to rethink power across various dimensions and move away from anthropocentric notions of power-as-domination or power-over. Instead, we should include assemblages of acting entities, from microbes to bees, humans, nation states, infrastructures, forests, oceans, and other life forms that extend their power across varying intensities and durations. Only such a view of power-as-potential or power-to can deepen our democratic politics and ensure the continuation of our planet as a livable habitat for us and other species. These insights have, according to Tønder, ontological, conceptual, epistemological, methodological, and practical aspects, and his book develops them with rigor and precision.
The book’s structure reflects its argumentative clarity. It is divided into six chapters that define its argumentative backdrop, review existing approaches to power, flesh out Tønder’s eco-centric conception of power, sketch methodological approaches in light of this new perspective, consider how this account of power reframes our approach to democratic institutions and the politics of swarming, and chart the consequences of doing so for our self-understanding and the relationship of critique and praxis therein. A new materialist glossary that defines key terms further adds to the book’s clarity and comprehensibility.
The clarity of Tønder’s work stands in contrast to many new materialist discussions in political theory, philosophy, and social theory, which have for a long time assumed a somewhat difficult and opaque prose. They often involve interdisciplinary discussion and conceptual vocabularies that are both highly abstract and deeply empirical. They link very different matters—actants, species, sites, time-scales, life forms, effects, affects, and so on—that connect microplastics to climate zones; geoengineering to rising sea levels; and birds, insects, fungi, forests, oceans, and ponds to the politics of species adaptation and survival. As a result, their unquestionable intellectual depth can make it difficult to understand the conceptual arguments behind their important interventions.
Here, Tønder’s contribution strikes with utmost analytical clarity and precision, which makes his book especially readable. It is thus valuable to new readers who are not or only vaguely familiar with new materialist philosophies and their arguments that stretch our philosophical imagination beyond its all-too-human perspective. But Tønder’s book does not deride these earlier contributions. It builds on their insights and makes them more accessible, carefully connecting his own arguments to existing studies of power (pp. 53, 72), other traditions of materialism (pp. 96–97), and new materialist thinkers like Jane Bennett and Karen Barad who already view power as immanent to life (pp. 98–105).
As a consequence, Tønder’s book does not, at first sight, seem to offer much conceptual novelty to new materialist debates in ecological political theory. Rather, it offers theoretical bridges across different sub-disciplinary discussions. Tønder’s pedagogical approach, clarity, and accessible argumentation are among the book’s main strengths. One of the promises of his work, therefore, is to pluralize disciplinary debates by virtue of striking a different tone and offering a more systematic approach.
In this spirit, Tønder’s central conceptual shift from power-as-domination to power-as-potential held by assemblages and capable of facilitating change of varying intensities and durations significantly advances the conceptual apparatus in ecological political theory and—by the logic of his own argument—might develop the capacity to effect gradual but lasting change within these debates. Tønder carefully lays out the conceptual framework of power, which comprises “blunt power,” “explosive power,” “gradual power,” and “virtual power” (105–111). “Blunt power” is the power that is short in duration and low in intensity, that which is likely to be avoided if one wants to affect the outcomes of any situation. “Explosive power” in the form of political revolutions, flash floods, earthquakes, or state interventions often involves rapid change, but it also turns out to be unable to sustain itself and diminishes as quickly as it erupts. “Gradual power” is both more subtle and long-lasting, involving transformations that go deeper than a burst of sudden change. It is self-sustaining and generates further potential by building on plural ensembles and making new connections between various actants possible. Gradual power is, therefore, creative and enabling, and both normatively and analytically favored by Tønder’s own position. Lastly, “virtual power” is the speculative and immaterial reservoir of power immanent to all human and nonhuman matter, echoing the pre-Socratic notion of apeiron or, closer to new materialist debates, Bruno Latour’s not very much developed notion of “plasma”—both metaphysical notions that acknowledge that change across relations requires some metaphysical excess beyond present configurations to come about.
Some readers might feel alienated by this seemingly reductionist view that divides different kinds of power into a neat taxonomy with four categories of power distinguished by two dimensions: duration and intensity. “Blunt power” and “explosive power” are short in duration and of variable intensity, while “gradual power” is slow-moving across durational scales and of high intensity, as is “virtual power,” which is the immanent backdrop of all other categories. I see this approach as an advantage, however, for it reduces complexity and theoretical abstraction so as to argue for an eco-centric view of society and politics in a more accessible and thus inclusive manner. Tønder offers conceptual tools that should not be mistaken for a real depiction of the messy nuance and complexity of eco-political life. These conceptual distinctions may well risk diluting the theoretical depth and imaginative strength of new materialist discourse. But theoretical depth also runs the risk of becoming as disorienting as it is inspiring. Balancing analytical schematism with various examples and concrete cases in which different kinds of power are at play, Tønder delivers what he sets out to do: a “new materialist rethinking of an analysis of power, which in both depth and breadth goes beyond existing studies of power” (225).
While Tønder is not just stretching traditional debates on power, he also does not argue for a complete displacement of traditional approaches to power. Rather, he calls for a more nuanced discussion of different types of power and their various connections. His emphasis on “new materialism’s expanded analysis of power” (28, emphasis added) thus allows us to view different modes of blunt, explosive, and gradual power as intertwined and interlaced with traditional views of power-over to make sense of concrete cases, such as counter carbon storage programs, regenerative agriculture, or new forms of democratic representation that aim to include concerns of nonhuman life and matter. Tønder’s conceptual work brings analytical nuance to contemporary debates in new materialist philosophies that tend to reject human-centric notions of power while adopting the rather loose language of potentiality.
Here, Tønder could have made more explicit his intervention in debates within eco-centric scholarship, which is often accused of leveling social hierarchies and obfuscating human agency and accountability. But as Tønder’s book makes clear, humans might not be at the center of the world while nevertheless remaining powerful actors, among many others. Humans have power-as-potential by virtue of their relations and dependencies with nonhuman matter and their reflective abilities to purposefully respond to them (103–4). More often than not, this results in human interventions that harm ecologies, but Tønder pushes us to consider how human power could be used for good. As a result, this book enables us to see power as unevenly distributed, thereby challenging both anthropocentrism and flat ontologies that regard distinctions between different kinds of actors as obsolete. It also crucially adds to new materialist debates and their often less systematic use of notions of “power” and “potential”–thereby offering a better conceptual understanding of key terms which should also facilitate discursive nuance and more precise analysis.
Of special interest to political theorists is Tønder’s fifth chapter on the organization of power. He reads both Hobbes and Spinoza, thinkers who are traditionally regarded as opposed in terms of their view of power as domination and potential. Tønder’s aim is to highlight tensions and overlaps that speak to his expansion of these concepts. Accordingly, Hobbes’s metaphorical and analytical ambiguities are reinterpreted as his acknowledgment of the powerful excess of nature and of humans who evade complete domination by the state and its absolute power. Spinoza is read as connecting domination and potentiality in his view of nature, while giving normative priority to nature and thus forming an important reference point for less anthropocentric discussions of democracy—what Tønder calls, with reference to William Connolly, the “politics of swarming.”
A final stand-out is Tønder’s short but sharp discussion of the critical exchange between eco-Marxism and new materialism. For eco-Marxists, new materialism downplays capitalist exploitation as the source of our climate misery. In their view, new materialists lose focus of the differentially distributed power and potential of a heterogeneous population of planetary inhabitants by deploying the “Anthropocene” narrative. Tønder convincingly shows that such claims overstate the differences between neo-Marxist and new materialist approaches and that new materialism indeed takes capitalism into consideration as an important historical-political mode of production. Against Andreas Malm’s influential criticism of new materialism for absolving the wealthy of responsibility, Tønder claims that “the question is not so much whether certain actors are more responsible than others (they are!), but rather how one, through a critique of power, might assign responsibility in a manner that opens up avenues of action that are sustainable in the long run” (220). For Tønder, the emancipatory potential of new materialism lies in its being a critical analytical framework able to analyze “the historically specific ways in which power is organized—and thus how the material potential in all things (human as well as nonhuman) gets distributed across space and time” (220). Tønder’s approach provides orientation and may even help us figure out how capitalism developed as such an ambiguous and destructive force by drawing our attention to how it is embedded in globally expanding assemblages of human actors, corporations, and nonhuman matter such as oil and logistical infrastructures.
Power in the Anthropocene is a remarkable contribution to current debates and will no doubt become a powerful reference point due to its argumentative, analytical, and stylistic strengths. This daring book might not persuade the hardcore of new materialists or mainstream approaches, but it is not intended to do so. It offers an extensive reservoir of insights for all those who are open to thinking more systematically and more imaginatively about power in the midst of planetary crises that we feel and sense the moment we step outside.