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This study explores conceptual conflicts embedded in the thematic grounding of classical realism. To establish conditions of consistent normality in human political behaviour for realist analysis, the rhetoric of originary political wisdom usually ties its claims, as a research framework, to myth and enlightenment. Because Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes articulated the premises of political realist analysis in the contexts of state formation, anarchic regional politics and perpetual war, these first figures of political authority seem to have set terms of geopolitical analysis that erase context, arrest temporality and homogenise space by pointing analysis back to classical events, thinkers and struggles in mythic terms. Critical theorists ask if such mythic styles of reasoning are a credible approach, even though many accept such modes of analysis. Consequently, this study explores how myth affects political realist studies to question how statecraft perpetuates itself on reason, myth and their contradictions.

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves appear to be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas.

Luke recounts the politics of the Anthropocene as a scientific-technical concept, the premise for rethinking human/nature relations, and an alibi for a grander articulation of green governmentality on a global to local scale. In many ways, the Holocene already was the early Anthropocene, and the political economy of human urbanization, industrialization, and globalization appears to capture more concretely in particular times and specific places what the Anthropocene reduces to the work of human species-being. Adapted from the source document.

This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political debates appears, first, to mystify the characteristics of the humans who are transforming the planet Earth on a biophysical scale in geological time, and, second, to justify the importance of new planetary eco–managerial interventions to administer the costs and benefits of these ecological events in the most efficient manner possible. As a result, the discourses of sustainability and resilience amid these worldwide changes appear to operate with increasingly conservative political agendas. On the one hand, they legitimate a strange fusion of ecological sustainability and economic development in green modernization programs, which could considered new policies for "sustainabilization." Yet, on the other hand, these codes of green performativity also work to preserve the historically inequitable distribution of wealth, technology, and power for those social forces that have caused the most ecological destruction around the world over the past 250 years.

This paper explores how the recent turn to the Anthropocene in many environmental and political debates appears, first, to mystify the characteristics of the humans who are transforming the planet Earth on a biophysical scale in geological time, and, second, to justify the importance of new planetary ecomanagerial interventions to administer the costs and benefits of these ecological events in the most efficient manner possible. As a result, the discourses of sustainability and resilience amid these worldwide changes appear to operate with increasingly conservative political agendas. On the one hand, they legitimate a strange fusion of ecological sustainability and economic development in green modernization programs, which could considered new policies for sustainabilization. Yet, on the other hand, these codes of green performativity also work to preserve the historically inequitable distribution of wealth, technology, and power for those social forces that have caused the most ecological destruction around the world over the past 250 years. ; Published version

Climate change is represented as an increasingly conventionalized cluster of signs, symbols, and stories. This symbolic formation typically is cast in various graphic and tabular presentations of how greenhouse gases are disrupting Nature and its environments. The essentially contested quality of this imaginary, and its conflicting characteristics, force one to re-examine how mediated, constructed, and rhetorical these depictions are. Such aesthetic constructs are a risky art in which climate change images can circulate as illusion, ideology, and invention as well as factual and functional scientific findings. Rather than being simple presentations of Nature as such, these efforts are often complex representations of social forces with political agendas. Presentations of these imaginaries as well as reactions to them leave one pondering how the images serve many purposes: to discredit or validate the still emerging sciences for modeling, monitoring, and managing climate change; to legitimize or forestall ongoing debates about climate change and its causes; or to aestheticize or paralyze thinking about global warming as the sheer immensity, root uncertainty, and clear complexity of taking any action grip both the elites and publics.