Writing in the mid-1960s, Russian literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin famously understood medieval carnival to reveal the truth of life’s rebelliousness against the authoritarian rule of official culture. Carnival was important to Bakhtin as it expressed an immanent liveliness that exceeded the regulatory controls of church and state and disrupted the binary hierarchies of power, distinguishing the governing and the governed, high culture from the low, and those with power from those without. Carnival was a world of freedom from external constraint: a world of immanent becoming, rather than transcendental laws: ‘Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it… While carnival lasts there is no life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its own laws, that is the laws of its own freedom.’ (Bakhtin, 2009: 7)

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In most treatments in the discipline of International Relations, the Anthropocene and the ethos of carnival could not be further apart. The Anthropocene, formally a concept derived from geological debate over the level of human impact upon the earth’s geomorphology, is often treated merely in terms of the potential security implications of climate change and global warming. Nothing to probe here, just another set of problems which require the assembling of expertise, resolving some organisation issues, perhaps some lobbying and resource redistribution, and then we can be on our way. There seems to be something a little soulless about this rationalist problem-solving approach, whether it’s cast in terms of addressing a planetary crisis, a global problem or even a plain old-fashioned international one (see Burke et al, 2016). It often seems that we are missing out on the disruptive commotions occurring across other disciplines and, even more so, on their expressive eruptions of joy and celebration. It is these more affective aspects of the contemporary condition that we often fail to grapple with and that I wish to foreground in this short piece.

Because we are so used to seeing problems as governmental opportunities - enabling the advocacy of new legislative, economic or military regimes, new modalities of international cooperation or empowering global activist networks – it can be difficult to take the Anthropocene seriously. When contemporary theorists talk about living after ‘the end of the world’ (Morton, 2013) we assume they are making dire predictions about the future or perhaps speaking metaphorically. Everything looks very much as it did before: states; governments;........

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