A tragic ethics for the Anthropocene: On the unmanageable and impossible in management learning

Abstract

This essay offers a reflection on which ethics can critically guide the field of management learning in the Anthropocene. Based on a negative ontology of humankind and nature, I understand the Anthropocene as being unmanageable and imposing an ethical dimension of the impossible on the field of management learning. Inspired by the Lacanian concept of tragic ethics, which is based on certain categories – radical contingency, indeterminacy and the impossible – I propose a tragic ethics for the Anthropocene. Such ethics, articulated to an indigenous ontology and ethics, presents the possibility of an open way of knowing and learning in the context of management learning, which is necessary not only for the radical contingency of the Anthropocene but also for the inclusion of other voices and knowledge, both human and nonhuman.

Keywords

Amerindian perspectivism anthropocene tragic ethics unmanageable

Introduction

To name is not to say what is true but to confer on what is named the power to make us feel and think in the mode that the name calls for. (Stengers, 2015: 43)

The term Anthropocene – suggested by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) to characterize the current epoch on Earth, the age of humankind as a geological force – has grown in popularity in management and organization studies (MOS), despite being considered inadequate due to its perceived ‘apolitical diagnosis’ and the challenges it poses ‘for organizational categories’ (Campbell et al., 2019: 733). Interestingly, a special issue of a journal in this field, devoted to this theme through an analysis of the key organizing narratives that inform various understandings of the Anthropocene, was published (Wright et al., 2018). Some of these narratives conform to the perspective proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) based on faith in our technological capacity to organize the Anthropocene, while others oppose various ways of organizing, whether in terms of resistance to fossil-fuel-based capitalist economic growth (Kalonaityte, 2018) or through new ways of organizing the environment, such as permaculture (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018) and alternative food networks (Beacham, 2018). Since then, scholars have discussed the scope and limitations of the Anthropocene in the organizational context, relying on relational ontologies (Ergene et al., 2018, 2021; Gasparin et al., 2020; Heikkurinen et al., 2021).

In the management learning (ML) field, where the debate related to the Anthropocene is still in its beginning stage, Gasparin et al. (2020) questioned the validity of organizational analyses that reject the term ‘Anthropocene’, concluding that the problem in terms of its understanding and solution is not a lack of reason. Rather, the problem lies in the modes of reasoning that are the basis for business and management education, teaching and promoting economic models that are insensitive to the interdependencies between human action and the environment. In this context, the above authors proposed other ways of thinking about and acting on the Anthropocene and provided examples of local strategies aimed at collaborative survival, focusing on communication with nonhuman actors.

In ML, there has not yet been an analysis that has articulated ethics and the Anthropocene. In MOS, only one article has formulated an ethical proposition for the Anthropocene, considering the more-than-human ethics of care (Beacham, 2018). Relational ontology and the way it ‘converses with various strands of environmental ethics’ was also reinforced by Ergene et al. (2021: 1327). Based on this still scarce literature on the relation between the Anthropocene and ethics, I consider that the articulation of these two concepts has not been sufficiently problematized, as the extant analyses have aimed to present alternative organizational and learning solutions and practices to organize the Anthropocene. Such solutions, supported by relational ontologies, continue to rely on the human capacity to manage nature. However, it is fitting to ask who this ‘humankind’ should be in relation to nonhumans and what its capacity is as an agent, especially in relation to the Anthropocene. In addition, although I agree with Campbell et al. (2019) that the term Anthropocene poses impossible challenges for certain organizational categories, given that it establishes a timeframe that is unmanageable, it is essential to consider this term from an ethical dimension within ML that supports the radically ‘disorganized and unsettled’ (Meyer and Quattrone, 2021: 1373). Which ethics can, then, critically guide knowledge and learning in organizations and management in and about the unmanageable Anthropocene?

In this essay, I initially propose a discussion of the concept of the Anthropocene based on the negative and psychoanalytically inspired ontology that has already been considered by a variety of scholars, especially in the fields of geography and philosophy (Neyrat, 2014; Pohl, 2020; Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018; Zizek, 2008), to achieve a strategy that decenters the anthropos from which the concept evolved. Based on this ontology, I propose a tragic ethics for knowing and learning in and about ML in the Anthropocene, taking as inspiration the Lacanian tragic ethics (Lacan, 1992). I start from the Lacanian inspiration because Lacan performed an important epistemological analysis when conceiving one outside the field traditionally articulated in his domain – philosophy – which connects to a negative ontology of nature and humankind, an undertaking that I consider fundamental in formulating an ethics for the Anthropocene in the context of ML, based on the category of the impossible. Finally, aiming to put this ethics into operation, I seek its approximations with ontology and indigenous ethics to locate practical anchor points for a tragic ethics in ML.

Although ML field analysis currently relies on psychoanalytic theory to argue that learning is an experience of failure (Driver, 2010), a view that corroborates Lacanian tragic ethics, my goal is not to focus on the learning process itself or specific ethics disciplines but rather to propose an ethical reflection for the ML field in terms of the Anthropocene, articulated around the impossibility proposed by this timeframe to the very meaning of management. In addition, as I am writing in a ‘provocation essays’ session (Brewis and Bell, 2020: 535), I use an adapted essay form (Adorno, 1984), despite the challenges that this form encounters in the context of MOS and ML (Gabriel, 2016; Lindebaum and Wright, 2021). My path does not begin with an exhaustive review of the literature, referring to the themes and concepts covered; instead, the review in this work emerges as the themes are activated and articulated throughout the narrative. Thus, the contribution of this essay is twofold: it begins a critical reflection on the concept of the Anthropocene in the field of ML and proposes a tragic ethics in which the Anthropocene is understood as being unmanageable, which should encourage those in the field to act in the face of the impossible.

The unmanageable Anthropocene

This is not just an environmental crisis but a geological revolution of human origin. (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2017: 11)

Since the Anthropocene was proposed as the defining term of the new Earth age, replacing the Holocene, the scientific community has gathered evidence about profound systemic changes to the Earth system, in which planetary limits, which go beyond climate change, have already been exceeded. Examples of such exceeded limits are biodiversity loss and their devastating effects on the terrestrial system and biogeochemical flows (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015). Therefore, there is already a relative consensus that we are living in a damaged system. However, calling this time period the Anthropocene and considering it a time in which humankind, understood as a species, is a new geological force and ‘human activities now rival the great forces of nature in driving changes to the Earth system’ (Gaffney and Steffen, 2017: 53) is still contested. I will not dwell on the geoscientific reasons for this controversy. I am interested only in noting the critical positions of some authors in the fields of humanities and social sciences in terms of the understanding of the Anthropocene to focus on aspects related to the ethical perspective in the ML field.

Among the many ethical-political reasons and various ontological, epistemological and theoretical strands that have led to critiques of the concept of the Anthropocene, the perspective presented by two historians of science, Bonneuil and Fressoz (2017), is a fundamental starting point for arguing why, despite the many problems posed for critical analysis by the concept of the Anthropocene, it is worth accepting it – without, however, yielding to its dominant discourse. The above authors consider that it makes sense to name this new epoch the Anthropocene since it resulted from the political, economic and technological choices of humans who have ultimately caused indelible damage to the world. Therefore, everything else is questionable, starting with what marked the beginning of the Anthropocene.

Of the various possible beginnings of the Anthropocene, Bonneuil and Fressoz (2017) argued that the starting date proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) – 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine and the scientific community began to obtain more specific information about the increased amount of gases in the atmosphere caused by industrialization – has validity, as long as we consider that the course of these 250 years was marked by many silenced voices that pointed to the known risks of ‘human extrusion’ (Neyrat, 2014), which would inevitably lead to the ‘intrusion of Gaia’ (Stengers, 2015). Gaia should be understood as a form of space experience that materializes the temporality of the Anthropocene, involving the assemblage of processes and relationships among ‘living beings, oceans, atmosphere, climate, [and] more or less fertile soils’ (Stengers, 2015: 38). Gaia is the propitious name of this being in relation to which the Anthropocene is defined and is the term that I consider when analyzing the negative ontology of the Anthropocene because, from this perspective, there is no way to speak of the Anthropocene without discussing Gaia.

It is no coincidence that the origin of the Anthropocene, at the time proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000), coincides with the modern era, a temporal classification of the humanities. As a material event, the beginning of the Anthropocene intensified with the Industrial Revolution and accelerated starting in the second half of the twentieth century (Zalasiewicz et al., 2015), signaling the arrival point of the modern project and its concept of progress driven by capitalism. In this sense, the Anthropocene ‘is the sign of our power but also of our impotence’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2017: 11). As a sign of power, the Anthropocene reinforces the great narrative of the human species and its redemption by science, since if human action has been negatively altering the Earth, then anthropos is able to solve the problems created through the use of reason, science, and technological advances, such as geoengineering. This consideration takes an anthropocentric view that radicalizes human power in managing nature, reinforcing the role of economics and technology in resolving planetary limits and the power of corporations and political elites in organizing the Anthropocene (Wright et al., 2018). This ideal is guided by a modern scientific project and its ethics of ‘mastery over nature’, which excludes ‘anything “other” based on class, race or gender’ (Schmidt et al., 2016: 190).

As a sign of human impotence, the Anthropocene exposes cracks in the modern project of dominance over and control of nature and the consequent social normativity of the project. Moreover, the Anthropocene exposes, for example, a lack of knowledge of the effectiveness of scientific interventions in response to climate change, as there are no guarantees of their results (Hamilton and Grinevald, 2015; Stengers, 2015). While the effectiveness of such interventions remains open to debate, catastrophes are already becoming a reality, and it is not possible to precisely know the exact intensity with which they will occur but only that they will occur more frequently (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2021). Thus, the Anthropocene has been shown to be radically unmanageable, in the direct sense of this term in the modern conception of management, posing impossible challenges for the field (Campbell et al., 2019). However, instead of rejecting the term, I propose that ML embrace the perspective of the impossible, in the sense of the not yet thought because it is outside the coordinates of existing thought. The impossible therefore requires changes in the very coordinates from which reality is understood (Zizek and Daly, 2004).

I propose an understanding of the Anthropocene based on the interpretation by contemporary philosophers and geographers who have reinvigorated Lacanian thought on the idea of materialist ontology (Neyrat, 2014; Pohl, 2020) and based on the ‘ontological incompleteness of reality itself’ (Zizek, 2009: 90). This interpretation is based on Lacan’s concept of the Real and his understanding of the world as being ontologically incomplete. Based on this premise, Gaia is understood as ‘the figure that disturbs every possible balance and completeness’ and that ‘confronts us with the inconsistencies taking place in nature itself’ (Pohl, 2020: 70). This ontology of Gaia as inconsistent and non-all allows us to simultaneously criticize the dominant view of the modern project that extends to the Anthropocene and the relational ontologies that rely on the possibility of harmony between humankind and nature based on a unified view of humanity as a species. It is precisely this exteriority or separation that makes the relationship between these domains possible (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018) and even allows for them to spread to other humanities. The Anthropocene, as both a material event and a cognitive event – if considered in the ontological key proposed here – makes it doubly evident that there is no possible reconciliation in the relationship between humankind and nature.

The Anthropocene also exposes the cracks in the humanist and anthropological project of humans as being identical to each other, a project that sought to build a way of life in which it was possible to determine what ‘humankind’ is, thus excluding all humans who do not fit this definition. It is not by chance that this concept of man has been recovered by the dominant view of the Anthropocene. In the scientific context from which the concept has emerged, anthropos is considered a great presence, a geological force confronting a difficult yet exhilarating task: supported by scientific knowledge, anthropos will lead humanity toward environmentally sustainable global management (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000).

Insisting on features of a human are not identical to himself or herself is the basis of the Lacanian critique of humanism and its proposition of a tragic ethics that is capable of opening space for the multiplicity of humans and their infinite ways of life. The Anthropocene, analyzed in this ontological key, therefore reveals this time in which Gaia, as well as humans, as one of the life forms that inhabit it, ‘lacks coherence, stability and fulfillment’ in the sense of immanent incompleteness (Pohl, 2020: 72). As a material event, the Anthropocene has unprecedentedly exposed this instability and coherence, so expelled by the modern project that contradictorily, it has provoked it. Referring to current time as the Anthropocene, therefore, directly affects where humans place themselves in this disturbing world, which is profoundly related to reflections on the meaning of human action – an ethical issue par excellence. Let us turn, therefore, to tragic ethics as the proposition of an ethical form that matches this concept of the unmanageable Anthropocene.

Greek tragedy as ethics: the Lacanian perspective

Wonders abound in this world, yet no wonder is greater than man. (Sophocles, Antigone)

Lacan’s return to Greek tragedy, in proposing a tragic ethics for psychoanalysis, favored one of the most original interpretations of Antigone. It is not my objective to recover all of his analysis but rather to emphasize some points of this interpretation in dialogue with the reasons that led him to seek out the characteristics of an ethics in Greek tragedy. I highlight the characteristics of Greek tragedy that can support a tragic ethics for the Anthropocene in ML.

The Lacanian path was marked by his questioning of the ethical models constituting modernity, starting, notably, from the ethics of virtues defined by Aristotle as the ‘science of happiness’ (Lacan, 1992: 313). Supported by a negative ontology, Lacan sought to formulate a type of ethics that was not solidary with the humanist project of a human being identical to himself or herself, resulting in ethical forms embedded with morality criteria that expel anyone who does not fit this normative ideal. To formulate this ethics, Lacan sought models of ethical conduct in Greek tragedy before ethics developed as a philosophical field in the 5th century BC and in the time space of its representation, a way of life that preceded that which became guided by the idea of happiness and which was constituted as an ethical characteristic of modernity, formulating a way of acting in accordance with the service of goods.

More than an art form, the Greek tragedy was an institutional device that aimed to place the polis in impossible situations to produce a social subjectivity open to indeterminacy, questioning the existing moral forms and power in exercise (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, 1990). The staging of a tragedy always presents an action that is not regulated by any form of existing knowledge, portraying borderline situations to which no concepts or previous knowledge can be applied and requiring paradoxical actions. For example, Antigone’s situation led her to question the laws of the polis, appeal to the unwritten laws of the gods and die to seek a dignified burial for her brother after such a burial was banned by Creon, the King of Thebes. Taking Antigone as a paradigmatic case, Lacan considered how this tragic heroine sustained a place of exception, while her action was elevated to the ethical insofar as it occupied a universal requirement: the right guaranteed, by the gods and customs, to bury the dead. Her action inverted the existing coordinates, questioning the legitimacy of royal laws and pointing out that it was Creon who was acting on a particular whim, ‘the pride of a poor king’ (Sófocles, 2009: 237). Antigone’s act was, therefore, on the order of the impossible.

Openness to otherness is another characteristic of tragedy considered by Lacan when formulating his tragic ethics. Greek tragedy presents humankind with the condition of suffering and death as ‘otherness of the world’ (Steiner, 1980). However, tragedy is not understood as fatalistic or unreasonable; rather, it follows another order – another form of knowing that constitutes a radical dimension of otherness. The tragic irony contained in certain versions of ‘praise to man’ in Antigone is one of the high points of this vision of humankind contained in the tragic universe, according to the Lacanian interpretation. As the chorus says, ‘There are a lot of wonders in the world, but there is nothing more wonderful than man’ (Lacan, 1992: 332). However, to predicate anthropos – humankind – Sophocles uses the word deinon, which is a polysemic term that can mean both ‘wonderful’ and ‘astonishing, frightening, and terrible’. There is also fine irony in the fact that this praise to humankind occurs moments before the heroine is condemned to death for refusing to follow the royal order. The song to anthropos is directed toward human capacity – including dominion over nature – as much as toward human impotence in the face of death, before which people are helpless. The tragic irony is thus directed toward this necessary encounter – in action – to which humankind has no response and no way out, indicating that the existing knowledge is not sufficient to guide their actions.

Anthropos, according to Lacan, knows many things, but this knowledge does not prepare him to face death or to act in response to circumstances for which existing knowledge is insufficient. Following his analysis of the tragic verses, Lacan examined how pantopores means ‘he who knows all kinds of tricks’ – humankind knows many tricks. Aporos is the opposite; it means ‘one has no resources or defenses against something’ (Lacan, 1992: 332). Humankind is helpless in the face of not only biological death but also radical contingency, which is presented as radically external, for which humankind is always aporos, without resources. Tragic ethics, therefore, is directed toward the purported omnipotence of humankind, showing that if knowledge makes humankind master of the universe, then it can also be the cause of its downfall. It was by denying the possibility of such knowledge – capable of finding its ultimate truth in science or nature – that Lacan turned to this tragic perspective in an epistemological shift that caused ethics to emerge from tragedy (Glynos, 2002).

Therefore, Greek tragedy presents an ethics in action and is not ‘thought out’, as in the philosophical field; it is also an action without guarantees because it is neither supported by any preexisting knowledge or norm nor guided by the promise of happiness. Inspired by this tragic statement about our presence in the world, permeated by radical contingency, Lacan proposed an ethics that forces us to rethink our conceptions of freedom, autonomy and responsibility – fields inherent to ethical reflection.

There was, therefore, a vision of humankind and nature in Greek tragedy – named by Lacan for ethics – that was silenced by later philosophical models: the radical contingency, the insufficiency of human knowledge, the ‘inhuman’ as that which does not meet what was later defined as ‘the humanity of man’, the act without guarantees and, even so, the subject’s responsibility for it. In this sense, tragic ethics can be understood as an ethics of indeterminacy that in turn encompasses the dimension of the impossible, conducive to the Anthropocene being considered a time marked by the absolute other – Gaia – signaling the transcendence that positions anthropos as lord of his own destiny and announcing a time that does not promise happiness as a response to the virtuous adequacy of humankind’s humanity.

On the impossible in ML

Perhaps we are very conditioned by an idea of being human and a type of existence. If we destabilize this pattern, maybe our mind suffers a kind of rupture, as if we fell into an abyss. Who said we cannot fall? Who said we have not fallen already? (Krenak, 2019: 57)

Although critical studies in ML have already questioned the instrumental training of business schools and the ethical dilemmas present in the proposition of critical training (Fenwick, 2005), this debate has not yet been integrated into the context of the Anthropocene. Even in the MOS field, there are still few critical analyses on the subject, which have neither questioned nor ended up incorporating the idea of humanity as a species, supported by the concept of the Anthropocene, in addition to relying on the possibility of a harmonious relationship between humankind and nature/nonhumankind as a viable response to the Anthropocene (Beacham, 2018; Ergene et al., 2021; Heikkurinen et al., 2021). Based on relational ontologies, such analyses run the risk of being appropriated by the dominant view of the Anthropocene, which also considers thinking about the link between humans and nonhumans but ignores the ‘multiplicity of human scenes’ (Neyrat, 2014), which leads to the apolitical position of the concept (Campbell et al., 2019).

Organizational actions alternative to the Anthropocene, such as slow design (Gasparin et al., 2020) and ecological agriculture (Beacham, 2018; Roux-Rosier et al., 2018), in fact confront management time aiming to operate on Gaia’s time. Slowing time involves halting the train of progress; however, how doing so will affect Gaia’s equilibrium since Gaia’s temporality is of another order is unknown (Stengers, 2015). A study by Beacham (2018), for example, showed how the relationship with the nonhuman is directed and can be reversed by the human himself or herself, presenting the limits of nonhuman agency. However, the question of the Anthropocene is of a different order, when humankind itself is no longer in a position to decide.

The Anthropocene poses impossible challenges to the ways of knowing and learning in ML to the extent that it is unmanageable, not only from the ontological perspective assumed in this essay but also from the material-historical event of the Anthropocene, understood from what Stengers (2015) called the ‘intrusion of Gaia’. From this idea comes the acknowledgment of Campbell et al. (2019) that we are facing an event that cannot be encompassed by organizations since it poses a problem that is unthinkable, unbounded and incalculable and therefore impossible for MOS and, consequently, ML.

However, the impossible, in the proposed ontological key, must be considered from the logical contradiction of the not yet thought. Based on modernity’s concept of ‘humankind’, it is impossible to think that a human can simultaneously be and not be a human. Including the category of the inhuman causes this concept to become thinkable. It is unthinkable, for example, that the field of epistemologically constituted as ML can consider the impossibility of management. However, an epistemological turn, based on a negative ontology, enables the sphere of the unmanageable to be included in ML. Based on such an ontological conception, the unmanageable includes the possibility of failure, leaving the field always open to the contingent and, therefore, the possibility of the new.

Thus, an ethics capable of critically guiding knowledge and learning in organizations and management in and about this unmanageable Anthropocene should be tragic, in the sense of being an ethics of indeterminacy, the fundamental basic principle of which is to risk the impossible. This ethical dimension of the impossible encapsulates, therefore, an open form of knowledge that can guide the ML field in the Anthropocene. This perspective has already been advocated by Driver (2017) who suggests that it is necessary to accept the idea of incompleteness not as an attempt to ‘domesticate the real’, which is impossible in all respects, but as a commitment to action based on what is not known. It is from this position – in the face of radical contingency – that ‘freedom and ethical choice can be exercised’ (Driver, 2017: 557) when there is a possibility of experimenting with various positions regarding contingency.

Characterized by modern rationality and its ideal of control, organizations and ML have been constituted as refractory to this ethical horizon, which is radically necessary in the Anthropocene. Given this acknowledgment, Campbell et al. (2019) proposed that organizations and, consequently, the ML field must learn to die. Although I agree that the West must learn to die, particularly in the sense of the decolonization of the thought that it generated as universal, the ethical dimension that I propose is that we also must learn how to live and organize our ways of life in a different way. Although the world may end in an instant, it is more likely that the Anthropocene will inaugurate a time in which the world we know and in which we live will gradually die, becoming something different and worse, and we will need other tools to experience it rather than manage it.

A form of knowledge open to contingency must also include an opening to other voices, both human and nonhuman, as well as to other knowledge. In this sense, although Lacanian thought was constituted in opposition to humanism and its rationalist paradigm, it is possible to question the adequacy of Lacanian tragic ethics – predominantly European in its authorship and inspiration – for the contemporary debate on the Anthropocene, notably from a non-Western, nonmodern perspective of another humanity. In this sense, it is interesting to note that Brazilian psychoanalysts and anthropologists (Dunker, 2015; Viveiros de Castro, 2015) have sought to bring Lacanian thought and the topic of the Anthropocene closer to the ontology and ethical dimension of Amazon/Amerindian indigenous peoples. Based on Amerindian perspectivism as an indigenous cosmopolitical theory, Dunker (2015) sought affinities between negative ontology and the animist/multinaturalist ontology of Amerindians, indicating that both hold a power of indeterminacy that is open to the ethical dimension of contingency and to the idea of humanity beyond the human conceived by Western modernity.

Animated, literally, by an animist/multinaturalist ontology, the Ameridian ethics of ‘joyful pessimism’ (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2014a) also has deep approximations with Lacan’s tragic ethics. The joyful pessimism relates to the acceptance of contingency, of the unmanageable, of the evanescence of life. Such acceptance does not prevent these peoples from singing, dancing and living with joy. Accepting death makes them live the present in the best possible way, without trying to control the future. Amerindians also have a deeply respectful relationship with Gaia – a concept that is itself animist – acting with it accordance with the principle of the interdependence of humans and nonhumans but not of relationships based on equality, balance and harmony (Scaramuzzi, 2021). Rooted in this rich worldview, these peoples have remained on the margins of Western civilization and its model of progress, denying forced acculturation, maintaining their own forms of organizing and continuing to live, despite the end of their world. In a psychoanalytic key, ‘this simple persistence against all odds is ultimately the stuff ethics is made of’ (Zizek, 2006: 146).

Learning to live through a joyful pessimism: final considerations on a tragic ethics in ML

To think is, in itself and above all particular content, negation, resistance against what is imposed on it. (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics)

The Anthropocene ‘is increasingly the object to which all business and management practices will have to refer to in some way’ (Gasparin et al., 2020: 397). Starting from this premise, how can we think of more concrete starting points for a tragic ethics in the context of ML without falling into the normativity that denies this very ethics, that is, without us determining its final form, transformed by this perspective? First, and fundamentally, we must consider, based on the proposed ethical principle, that practice is inseparable from knowledge. Without a transformation in the very structure of knowledge, there is no way to dissolve forms of action crystallized in a grammar that orders a hegemonic way of seeing the world. Based on this, it is necessary to question which Anthropocene should be the object of business and management practices and, by extension, of ML.

The conception of the Anthropocene proposed in this essay integrates various humanities while decentralizing these humanities around a network of interdependence with nonhumans. The Anthropocene, as an event, imposes not only a new thought on an unprecedented crisis but also reveals a crisis of hegemonic thought. Such thinking marginalizes knowledge, repressing discourses and practices that allow other relationships with nature to be experienced and that already warned of the risks of managing it as a resource. Therefore, when Campbell et al. (2019) argue that it was the Holocene that bequeathed our epistemologies, our conceptual tools and our organizational forms and that, if this epoch has passed, we need to die as organizations, we must consider that it was only a very short part of that 12,000 year historical time that structured our current ways of experiencing and organizing the world. It is fitting to ask what was left out, and this requires opening the ML field to a radical alterity in order to incorporate living experiences from other worlds and possible ways of organizing, connecting with nonhegemonic practices of organizing. Such practices are inseparable from the concrete experiences of each place and allow us to question the very conception of management, as configured in the birth of this field in a specific time-space. If this, on the one hand, pulls the rug out from under the established certitudes, on the other hand, it opens a path of possibilities that was outside the horizon of expectations determined by the field. The time of uncertainties that the Anthropocene establishes opens this gap for a transformation of knowledge that allows integrating the unknown and unmanageable to (un)management learning.

In the overlap between two ontologies and ethical models of such distinct knowledge, I sought to illustrate the possibility of opening up to radical alterity to make the impossible work in the field of thought so that a practice could arise. In this connection, Lacan’s tragic ethics took on the colors of the joyful pessimism of an ancestral people, whose ethnographic present reiterates some of the fundamental characteristics of the radical ethical attitudes necessary for the Anthropocene, which is to learn to live in a dying world. If the Anthropocene imposes the task of learning to die, the ontological approach to indigenous thought allows for learning to live with those who have had their civilization extinguished but who, even so, have continued to exist in a world that is no longer theirs. Conforming with such nonhegemonic knowledge and practices – which indicates a change in the direction of thought – is part of the impossible dimension that should guide the context of ML in terms of the Anthropocene.

Indigenous peoples resisted the end of their world with their own forms of organizing, integrated with a worldview inseparable from nature and of respect for all forms of life. Now, they are facing the threat of another ‘end of the world’. They already feel, in the way they perceive time, that the new rhythm (no longer cyclical) of the seasons indicates an ongoing imbalance that imposes another form of engagement with the world (Lisboa, 2021). They try to prevent, with their rituals, ‘the sky from falling’ – an event corresponding to the intrusion of Gaia (Kopenawa and Albert, 2015), and propose ‘ideas to postpone the end of the world’ (Krenak, 2019), not the world understood from the modern Western view, contained in the mainstream conception of the Anthropocene, but the world that remains on the margins of this dominant civilization.

The increasingly numerous studies conducted with indigenous communities in Brazil – the space of which I speak – reveal a sophisticated understanding that these peoples have of the Anthropocene and how their experience of time is inseparable from the way they organize themselves socially. The times are of activities and rituals, as they coincide with plantings, harvests and feasts. Therefore, when times change, the entire social lives of these people need to be readjusted (Mesquita, 2012). This conception of time of ‘slow societies’ (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2014b: 137) echoes the proposition of Gasparin et al. (2020) for a general program of slowing down’ as a means for Business and Management Schools to face up to the Anthropocene. These authors propose a slowdown in the ways in which the ML field formulates problems and builds models, as these occur in accelerated organizational time, in the competitive context that repels failure in the name of utility and success and that prevents listening to fundamental nonhuman actors, and I add, to other fundamental human actors.

The Amerindian experience is only one of the possible examples of ‘other worlds in the World’ (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2014b: 156) that can provide ML with concrete ways of living when the world is dying. Such experiences are presented as a rich field of research that becomes fundamental for the expansion of the existential horizon of our field so that we can learn to ‘think-live’ (Oliveira, 2021: 46) with other humans and nonhumans. Openness to radical alterity can generate the engagement necessary for us to develop a new perception of time and of our responsibility to nature and other forms of life, resulting in another type of ethical commitment that is not based on a list of morally ‘sustainable’ obligations.

Certainly, this is an ethical stance that can occur only at the edges of the dominant thought of the ML field, moving us ‘in a direction that is contrary to the political, economic, and academic institutions in which we reside’ (Ergene et al., 2021: 1320). It is a tragic ethical choice based on a policy of helplessness and not on an ecology of fear or disenchanted hope. If this is not enough to avoid the Anthropocene understood as the final event of humanity as a species, at least it allows us to engage with the joyful pessimism of indigenous peoples, building ‘colorful parachutes’ to experience this fall (Krenak, 2019), taking advantage of the time that remains – ‘the time that time takes to end’ (Agamben, 2016: 85) – by constructing forms of knowledge that encompass diverse, and therefore, existentially richer worlds.

Footnotes

Data availability

As an essay, there are no data to be made available

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Isleide Arruda Fontenelle

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