Humankind. Timothy Morton

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СКАЧАТЬ usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself, so that food is added to the worker as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, and grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, renewal and refreshment of the vital forces to the exact amount of torpor essential to the revival of an absolutely exhausted organism … What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.

      [It] not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power … but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour–power itself.⁴³

      The macabre final sentence reinforces the sense that what we are witnessing here is a brutal, very real version of scientistic reductionism. Consider how Marx describes a phase of early capitalist primitive accumulation in one witty sentence that also reduces the nonhuman: “First the workers are driven from the land, and then the sheep arrive.”⁴⁴

      The one nonhuman Marx doesn’t put on a lower level is capital as such. What is disturbing about commodity fetishism is that it doesn’t require (human) belief; it’s fully automated. What is disturbing about the “secret” of capital is not the extent to which it is hidden—even Adam Smith could point out that labor produces value. What disturbs is that its secret is on the surface: it is the secret of social form itself. In their fascination with content, the bourgeois political economists are blinded. Understanding is irrelevant, and this is the worst that could happen because understanding is the top access mode, since Marx inherited the lineage of Kant. As understanding is associated with the human, nonhuman access modes (brushing against, floating through, licking) are devalued. What is disturbing about commodity fetishism is its autonomous power. So, there is something fundamentally wrong with granting power to nonhumans. Is this idea a bug or a feature?

      NEOLIBERALISM AND PLANETARY AWARENESS

      The reduction of the human to the nonhuman and the reduction of the nonhuman to the brutal also suggests a way out. An ontology (a logic of how things exist) that didn’t reduce humans and nonhumans—thus preventing the sour taste that comes from being compared with wind or water—would contravene the implicit logic of capitalism, which makes an ontological noise that exactly resembles materialist reductionism.

      Since the UN’s Earth Summit (Rio, June 3–14, 1992), what has underpinned the fascist right in the USA has been opposition to solidarity with nonhumans. We can draw many conclusions from this. George Bush the First’s announcement of a post-Soviet New World Order is indeed sinister, but so is the fascist interpretation of that announcement. What is fascinating is how explicit the fascists are about it. They combine the Bush administration’s image of the New World Order with Agenda 21 of the nonbinding agreement signed by all the one hundred and seventy-eight participants in the Earth Summit to produce a “global banking conspiracy” theory that fuses anti-Semitism and hostility to nonhuman lifeforms.⁴⁵

      The first section of Agenda 21 makes noises about reducing poverty and changing patterns of consumption, about containing the explosion of human beings on the planet, and about making agreements in an ecologically “sustainable” way. The second section introduces the concept of biodiversity. The third section delineates the groups of (human) stakeholders involved in Agenda 21’s vision. The fourth section talks about implementation. “Sustainability” is the key term, and just as when Goebbels heard the word “culture” he reached for his gun, when I hear the word “sustainability” I reach for my sunscreen. “Sustainability” is an even more vacuous term than “culture,” and the two terms overlap. What is being sustained, of course, is the neoliberal, capitalist world-economic structure. And this isn’t great news for humans, coral, kiwi birds or lichen. This adds up to an explosively holist political and economic agenda. Individual beings don’t matter; what matters is the whole that transcends them.

      We require another holism if we are going to think at a planetary scale without just upgrading or retweeting the basic agricultural theological meme, a meme that justifies a human–nonhuman boundary. Fascism is an atavistic reaction to the reality of this oppressive failure, attempting to replace the new god with a fantasy old god, “Making America Great Again.” The fusion in the fascist imaginary of Agenda 21 with the New World Order results, as in geometrical triangulation, in a virtual image of an international (Jewish) banking conspiracy. Like the schizophrenic defense of paranoid hallucinations papering over the void of extreme anxiety, the overlap between anti-Semitism and a positive, fleshed-out image of an explosively holist biospheric “international community” defends against the void of actual ecological awareness. The symbiotic real is necessarily ragged and pockmarked.

      Yet, a further conclusion to be drawn is something that may sound counterintuitive, and we have certainly heard more seemingly intuitive arguments recently. It seems that racism is underpinned by speciesism. Humankind claims that it’s exactly the opposite: racism subtends speciesism. Finely grained violent distinctions between who gets to count as human and who doesn’t generate an “Uncanny Valley” (a term in robotics design) in which the nonhuman (dolphins for instance, or R2-D2) is sharply different from the human: separated from the human by an unbridgeable chasm. If you look out over the chasm at the definite nonhumans, it’s as if the chasm doesn’t exist. But far from being a thin, rigid boundary that might as well not exist, the Uncanny Valley is a sloppy hole like a mass grave, containing thousands of abjected beings. The Left should take heed that the Far Right underpins speciesism with racism by fusing paranoia about biodiversity with anti-Semitism. The struggle against racism thus becomes a battleground for ecological politics. “Environmental racism” isn’t just a tactic of distributing harm via slow violence against the poor. Environmentalism as such can coincide with racism, when it distinguishes rigidly between the human and the nonhuman. Thinking humankind in a non-anthropocentric way requires thinking humankind in an anti-racist way.

      We can get there by appropriating and modifying Heidegger’s concept of “world.” Having a world needn’t mean living in a vacuum-sealed bubble, cut off from others. World needn’t be a special thing that humans construct, least of all the German humans whom Heidegger seems to think are the best at worlding. We will disarm Heidegger from within. It’s not that there is no such thing as world, but that world is always and necessarily incomplete. Worlds are always very cheap. And this is because of the special non-explosively holist interconnectedness that is the symbiotic real; and because of what OOO calls “object withdrawal,” the way in which no access mode whatsoever can totally swallow an entity. “Withdrawn” doesn’t mean empirically shrunken back or moving behind; it means—and this is why I now sometimes say “open” instead of “withdrawn”—so in your face that you can’t see it.

      Everything in existence has a tattered, “lame” world: you can quite easily reach through your shredded curtain to shake a lion’s paw, and the lion can do the same. An owl is an owl, and the reason to care for her is not that she’s a member of a keystone species; we don’t need her to be a brick in a solid wall of world, we need to take care of her, play with her. This gives us a strong reason to care for one another, no matter who we are, and for other lifeforms. It gives us a leftist way of saying that we have things in common. We are humankind.

      Now we can see in more detail how strong MATT cheats on Marx and ecology in a correlationist anthropocentric way. Claiming that “Marx Already Thought That” means that ecological politics and ethics amount to “saving the Earth,” which means “saving the world,” which means “preserving a reasonably human-friendly environment.” This isn’t solidarity, this is infrastructural maintenance. What is preserved is the cinema in which human desire projection can play on the blank screen of everything else.

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