In the name of Gaia
Intrusion of Gaia or Anthropocene?
The concept of the Anthropocene has been widely interpreted as a point of convergence between geological history and human history, forcing a reconsideration of the scale at which human action must be understood. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously argues that this new epoch compels us to bring together the history of capital and the deep history of the human species. On this view, climate change appears to reintroduce “humanity” as a geological agent, not as a political subject alone but as a species capable of transforming planetary systems. Yet this move also risks a conceptual slippage: the identification of planetary transformation with species identity tends to collapse very different orders of explanation into a single figure of “the human.”
A similar ambiguity appears in Paolo Virno’s attempt to connect the evolution of global capitalism with the biological history of Homo sapiens. While such accounts powerfully emphasize the deep entanglement of labor, cognition, and biological evolution, they often leave unexamined the nonhuman processes that both enable and constrain human activity. In doing so, they risk re-centering explanation on human capacities -even when the aim is to decenter anthropocentrism.
On the other hand, Bruno Latour’s analysis of Gaia offers a decisive correction to these tendencies. Against interpretations that attribute ecological disruption solely to capitalism, Latour insists that the contemporary Earth crisis cannot be reduced to a single causal structure. Capitalism is undoubtedly a central operator in planetary transformation, but it functions within a far more complex web of interacting geological, atmospheric, biological, and technological processes. What is at stake is not the primacy of one system over another but the entanglement of heterogeneous agencies that no longer allow for a clear separation between society and nature, or between human and nonhuman causality.
From this perspective, the Anthropocene does not simply name a historical period in which humanity becomes a geological force. It also exposes the instability of “humanity” as an explanatory category. The different periodizations of the Anthropocene -whether traced to industrialization, the advent of fossil fuels, or earlier colonial extraction regimes- do not merely disagree about dates; they reveal deeper disagreements about what counts as an explanatory unit. Is the relevant unit the human species, capitalist modernity, or planetary systems?
Now, Jason W. Moore’s concept of “double internality” directly challenges the assumption that these units can be separated. Rather than treating nature and society as external to one another, Moore argues that each is internally constituted through the other. “Nature” is not a pre-given domain upon which history acts; it is continuously produced through historically specific socio-ecological relations. Yet even this formulation can be pushed further. If nature is internally differentiated through social relations, then neither “nature” nor “society” can function as stable ontological grounds. Both must be understood as outcomes of ongoing processes of co-formation.
At this point, the contrast between the Anthropocene and Gaia becomes decisive. The Anthropocene discourse, even in its most critical formulations, often oscillates between two poles: either humanity is treated as a geological force, or capitalism is treated as the dominant driver of planetary change. In both cases, explanation remains tied to already constituted entities -species, systems, or structures.
Stengers’ concept of the intrusion of Gaia breaks with this framework at this particular point. Gaia is not an epochal label or a totalizing system but the name for a situation in which multiple heterogeneous processes enter into relations that can no longer be governed or fully represented from a single standpoint. What intrudes is not a unified agent but a field of relational forces that reorganize the conditions of existence themselves. In Simondonian terms, Gaia designates a metastable planetary milieu in which new individuations emerge without reference to a sovereign center of explanation.
Thus, from this perspective, the Anthropocene names a problem of classification, whereas Gaia names a problem of individuation. The first asks which entity is responsible for planetary transformation; the second asks how heterogeneous processes co-individuate to produce unstable planetary realities in the first place. The shift from Anthropocene to Gaia is therefore not merely terminological but ontological: it replaces explanations based on already-formed subjects with an account of planetary becoming as transductive co-individuation across human and nonhuman milieus.
Thinking Gaia Philosophically: Starting From/With Relation
Although the name Gilbert Simondon is often read primarily as a philosopher of technics and technogenesis, his ontology of individuation has increasingly been mobilized in political and ecological theory. While explicit references to politics in Simondon’s work remain limited, the implications of his thought for rethinking collective life have generated sustained discussion over the past decades. Étienne Balibar has identified a significant convergence between Spinoza and Simondon in their shared emphasis on relational ontology around the concept of transindividuality where individuals are not primary substances but effects of relational processes of exterior and interior millues. Similarly, Muriel Combes argues that Simondon displaces the classical juridical framework of the social contract by refusing to treat individuals as preconstituted units prior to social relations. Paolo Virno, drawing on Simondon through the Italian reception of his work, extends this relational ontology toward an analysis of collective forms of life under contemporary capitalism. Feminist thinkers such as Elizabeth Grosz and Hasana Sharp have already further developed Simondon’s framework to challenge the figure of “Man” as sovereign subject, instead situating subjectivity within broader processes of material and collective becoming.
Across these different readings, what becomes central is Simondon’s concept of transduction, which names the process through which individuation occurs. Transduction designates neither a simple causal relation nor the application of form onto matter, but a process in which an entity emerges while simultaneously transforming the conditions of its emergence. Individuation is therefore never a completed fact; it is an ongoing operation in which beings both undergo and participate in their own formation. In this sense, individuation is always co-individuation: the individual and its milieu arise together within a shared field of metastable tensions.
From this perspective, Simondon’s ontology can be read as a radical reformulation of the concept of relation itself. As one of his best commentators, Combes suggests, Simondon effectively reverses the classical hierarchy between substance and relation: what is real is relational, and what is relational is real. This does not mean that reality is reducible to relations in an abstract sense, but that beings have no ontological priority over the relational processes through which they emerge. Reality is not a domain of fixed entities linked by external relations; it is the ongoing genesis of entities through relations that are themselves continually transformed and transform their own conditions.
This shift has profound consequences for ontology. It replaces a metaphysics grounded in already-constituted individuals with an ontology of individuation as process. Instead of asking what a thing is, Simondon’s framework asks how something becomes what it is through its relation to a milieu. Ontological priority is thus displaced from substance to process, from identity to becoming, from the individual to individuation itself.
Reformulated in these terms, the transition from classical substance ontology to Simondon’s relational ontology can be expressed as a shift from sub specie substantialis to sub specie relationis. What appears as a stable entity, whether a biological organism, a technical object, or even the Earth itself, must be understood as the provisional stabilization of ongoing processes of individuation. Stability does not contradict becoming; it is one of its local effects. Discontinuity and non-finality are therefore not exceptions to being but constitutive features of it. Therefore, apparent boundaries between entities mark moments of relative stabilization within continuous processes of transformation.
This ontological shift provides a direct conceptual entry point for thinking Gaia. If beings are always the outcome of relational individuation, then the Earth cannot be understood as a fixed background or as a completed totality. Gaia must instead be approached as a metastable field of ongoing planetary individuation in which geological, biological, atmospheric, and technical processes continuously co-determine one another. What we call “Earth” is not a substance but a process that remains perpetually in-formation.
This perspective also resonates with feminist and anthropological approaches that emphasize life in conditions of precarity and entanglement. Works by Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers have shown that contemporary forms of life unfold in damaged, unstable, and partially ruined environments, where survival depends on heterogeneous forms of collaboration across species, systems, and materials. These accounts converge with Simondon’s ontology in their rejection of human exceptionalism and their emphasis on distributed agency across heterogeneous assemblages. Life is not the expression of a sovereign subject but the effect of relational infrastructures that exceed any single form of control or intention.
From this standpoint, Gaia can be understood not as a unified organism or a metaphysical totality but as a name for the ongoing co-individuation of living and nonliving processes. It designates a world in which relations precede entities not temporally but ontologically, and in which beings exist only as temporary stabilizations within broader fields of transformation. Thinking Gaia through Simondon therefore means shifting from a philosophy of substances to a philosophy of relational becoming, where Earth itself appears as an open-ended process of individuation without final form.