“Instead of altering the phenomenon observed through the act of observation, so that the pre-observation state of the phenomenon is unknowable in principle,” Scott suggests that, “the effect of (uninterested) observation in this case is to alter the phenomenon in question over time so that it, in fact, more closely resembles the stripped down, abstract image the lens had revealed.”⁷⁵ From this perspective, Haeckel’s view is a post-observational summary of colonization; that is, as the latest observer, he sees only the results of what his predecessors produced through their reverse hallucinations, culminating in an image of the colony as nature itself.

A second approach to reassembling the natural, which we would like to propose here, returns us to the claim with which we began—namely, that the enduring image of science as an enterprise committed to a positivist clarification of knowledge through the elimination of any ethical friction or moral doubt, subverts contemporary inquiries into climate change and related forms of environmental violence. How exactly does the history of the colonial will to knowledge in the tropics evince such a concern? As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have noted, “Their cultivated individualism and voluntarism may seem diametrically opposed to self-effacing objectivity, but, in fact, subjectivity and objectivity defined poles of the same axis of the will: the will asserted (subjectivity) and the will restrained (objectivity)—the latter by a further assertion of will.”⁷⁶ The suppression of ethical concerns by way of these subjectivation processes required by positivist colonial scientific practices form the historical preface to the Anthropocene. How to best describe this suppression and its irruptive albeit minor history of uncertainty?

The inimitable philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has recently reoriented the discussion of the Anthropocene with her claim that what is now being witnessed—whether under the flag of the Anthropocene, climate change, or the generalized anthropogenic disturbance of the world and its many worlds—might be best described as the intrusion of Gaia.⁷⁷ As Stengers writes, “Gaia is neither Earth ‘in the concrete’ and nor is it she who is named and invoked when it is a matter of affirming and of making our connection to this earth felt, of provoking a sense of belonging where separation has been predominant, and of drawing resources for living, struggling, feeling, and thinking from this belonging. It is a matter here of thinking intrusion, not belonging.”⁷⁸ She continues, “The intrusion of this type of transcendence, which I am calling Gaia, makes a major unknown, which is here to stay, exist at the heart of our lives. This is perhaps what is most difficult to conceptualize: no future can be foreseen in which she will give us back the liberty of ignoring her. […] We will have to go on answering for what we are undertaking in the face of an implacable being who is deaf to ourjustifications.”⁷⁹ Within this study of reverse hallucinations, the intrusion of Gaia requires one additional clarification.