Humankind. Timothy Morton

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      Attending to the shadows and the flickering flames means that to care for ourselves and other lifeforms beyond mere maintenance of vanilla existence, we will need to embrace a haunting, uncanny, spectral dimension. Ecological reality is suffused with a ghostly, quivering energy that cannot be contained as “spirit” or “soul” or “idea” or “concept” without violence. It pertains to phenomena that we call “paranormal,” which is easiest to think as action at a distance, non-mechanical causality: telepathy, telekinesis, nonliving things moving by themselves—life as a subset of a vaster quivering, movement itself as a subject of a deeper shimmying. To think the human without recourse to reactionary essentialism, to embrace other lifeforms and other humans in solidarity, would need to allow for the possibility of tables that can dance. Such thoughts are taboo in Western metaphysics and culture; and in particular, wouldn’t that mean we have to believe something fundamentally wrong? For instance, will we have to accept that the reality of capitalist commodity agency—alienated human productive powers in the form of dancing commodities in the world of exchange value—are here to stay? To submit to a system that doesn’t even require belief, only acquiescence? What kind of left ecology is this?

      Yes, I really am going to argue that commodity fetishism is saying something true, in a distorted way, about the way things are, the symbiotic real. I really am going to argue, moreover, that consumerism is saying something true about the symbiotic real.

      LOSING OUR COOL

      Why are we suddenly so interested in humans as a species, and what might need adjusting in how we picture ourselves to ourselves? The main reason is ecological: it’s what we have been doing to other species that is enabling us to think ourselves as a species. Thinking this way supplies the missing piece of the jigsaw of leftist thinking since the 1960s—how to integrate ecology with social revolution.

      The New Left unintentionally does what it claims not to. It universalizes the human by distinguishing human beings metaphysically from all nonhumans, in an implicitly pre-Kantian ontological move that seriously weakens, unconsciously, its political edge. Marxist nature means (human) economic and cultural metabolism. Use-value means how a thing appears—for a human. At the very least, other lifeforms should be thought as participating in metabolic economic relations, if not cultural ones. There are octopus economic metabolisms and mountain goat economic metabolisms. The name for all these metabolisms used to be the “economy of nature,” which Haeckel compressed into the term “ecology.” Ecology names a scale larger than only human metabolisms.

      Human economic relations are taken to be the “Decider” that makes things real, that constructs a meaningful reality. Everything else gets to be the same kind of thing, protestations aside: the blank screen for the projection of these relations. Ironically, capitalism for Marx ensures that what these relations produce are relations between commodities that then determine relations between humans. Trees may not have agency, but cans of soup and hedge funds have plenty, another reason for a reflex against the object-oriented view. This is a subtle issue: we are definitely talking about relations between humans rather than relations between whales determining the system that then, when it’s capitalism, determines (alienated) relations between humans once again. (“Then” in that sentence is a logical “then,” not a chronological “then.”) But these relations, whether capitalist or not, are already not humans: they are sets of relations concerning the enjoyment of life, of creativity, of “production.” It is simply that the relations are between humans. This is worth pondering for one more sentence: what it means is that humans are not exhausted by these relations. Some modes of Marxism might convince you that we’re stuck in capitalism forever, forgetting that if there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism, that means that capitalist relations don’t exhaust humans. It’s just that the nature of these relations make the humans “real”; they “realize” them as capitalist or as feudal humans.

      Again, ironically, this means that the supposedly anti-essentialist, antihumanist poststructuralist-influenced Left is the last defense of the human imagined as a category decisively separated from the nonhuman. It’s perfectly possible and indeed necessary to think nonhumans in a leftist way. Denouncing attempts to do so as “hippie” and denouncing ways of proceeding to do so as “phenomenological” (the polysyllabic version of “hippie”) will no longer suffice.

      The trouble is, who gets to decide who or what the Decider is? For a philosopher who was somewhat canny about this kind of truth space, quoting Juvenal’s “Who watches the watchmen?”, Marx’s upside-down Hegelianism contains a glitch that is both logically strange (there’s an obvious infinite regress) and politically oppressive. Can we debug the Decider model—can we de-anthropocentrize it?

      “Species” means an entity that is real but not constantly present beneath appearances, not constantly the same. “Human” means me plus my nonhuman prostheses and symbionts, such as my bacterial microbiome and my technological gadgets, an entity that cannot be determined in advance within a thin, rigid outline or rigidly demarcated from the symbiotic real. The human is what I call a “hyperobject”: a bundle of entities massively distributed in time and space that forms an entity in its own right, one that is impossible for humans to see or touch directly.⁴⁶ Here’s Marx writing about his concept of species-being in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

      Species-life, both for man and for animals, consists physically in the fact that man, like animals, lives from inorganic nature; and because man is more universal than animals, so too is the area of inorganic nature from which he lives more universal. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., theoretically form a part of human consciousness partly as objects of science and partly as objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, his spiritual means of life, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and digest them—so too in practice they form a part of human life and human activity. In a physical sense man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

      Estranged labour not only (1) estranges nature from man and (2) estranges man from himself … it also estranges man from his species. It turns his species-life into a means for his individual life.⁴⁷

      Notice the modality of “universal” here: nonhumans can also be universal, just less universal. In this passage, species-being is an interface with the symbiotic real, so intimate that it’s an interface between nature and nature. Now, look at what Marx says about species-being a few lines later:

      The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being, i.e. a being which treats the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their СКАЧАТЬ