The Anthropocene Goes

Abstract

The Anthropocene, a newly proposed geological event, continues to provoke debate across the sciences, humanities, and arts. While its stratigraphic status remains uncertain, the Anthropocene has already transformed scholarly and cultural imaginaries by entangling earth history with social history. To navigate this controversy, this paper mobilizes Paul Feyerabend’s notion of epistemological anarchism, summarized in the phrase “anything goes”, as a way to rethink the methodological and epistemic pluralism demanded by the Anthropocene. From “anything goes” to “anthropocene goes”, the argument here emphasizes that no single disciplinary lens or universal method can adequately capture the complexity of planetary transformations. Instead, pluralistic approaches must recognize multiple temporalities, causalities, and lived experiences of the climate regime, while also confronting the exclusion of underrepresented communities from epistemic participation.