Humankind. Timothy Morton

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СКАЧАТЬ his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being … estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.⁴⁸

      In the second passage, not a page later, only humans get to universalize. We end up with the idea that only humans have species-being. Notice, then, that species-being is ambiguously anthropocentric. It has one foot in anthropocentrism, but one foot not. Humankind is arguing that we can lift out the foot standing in anthropocentrism.

      The Anthropocene is the time at which the human becomes truly thinkable in a non-teleological, non-metaphysical sense. The waste products in Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense, as if what the human becomes is a flickering ghost surrounded by a penumbra of flickering shadows that seem to hover around it like a distorted halo. This is what we shall call “spectrality.” In a weird increase of the amplitude of Derrida’s thoughts on the spectral and Marx, we will take spectrality as part of the actual world, not just something that haunts the idea of communism. Derrida leaves the ontological just as it is, which in the end means that big business gets to define the ontological in our age. What happens if we don’t leave the ontological alone?

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       Life

      I’m—Oh, what is that word? It’s so big. And so complicated. And so sad.

      —Doctor Who (The word is “alive.”)

      Let’s drop the deadly concept of survival. A glance at Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz shows how the most virulent form of death culture marks a rigid and thin separation between life and death. “Survival” is the key word: This is sheer “living on,” yet this is fissured from within between trying not to be dead, and waiting to be dead (the “Müsselmäner”). The fissure is an artifact of the industrial violence done to the victims. When Nazi logistics meets actually existing people, all kinds of uncanny beings “between” the rigid categories of life and death begin to manifest.

      Logic doesn’t like this very much because logic doesn’t like ambiguity. In traditional logic, there is no room for a middle zone, the zone that one encounters in regular “life.” Yet actual “life” as opposed to Life with a capital L inhabits this excluded middle zone. What is called “life” is a hesitancy between two different kinds of death: blind machination and total nonexistence. Life as such cannot be opposed to disability. A limb is always a prosthetic limb, an eye is always an artificial one. The engine of evolution is mutation for no reason, such that it is impossible to tell when a new lifeform shows up between a variation and a monstrosity.

      But logic, with its “Law” of Noncontradiction and its consequent Law of the Excluded Middle, prohibits the very shades of gray that define small-l life as such. What does this tell us about logic? That it is, as Nietzsche argued, a product of the agricultural age (we live in a version of Mesopotamia) with its patriarchies and its caste systems. Humankind must be thought through this excluded middle, spectral realm between the two kinds of death, not as some idealized living substance. Human life is less spectacular, less grandiose, less vital; more ambiguous, more disturbing and more encompassing. Only then can we think humankind outside of the logistics that resulted in neoliberal capitalism. Let’s distinguish this concept of life from other minimal definitions of life, for instance, in utilitarianism or in the notion of sheer sur-vival, or “living on.”¹ This is not to oppose mere living on with some whole and healthy bland vitality.

      Fragility is a basic ecological category because it’s a basic ontological category. If a thing is exactly what it is yet never as it appears, it is broken from within. To exist is to be disabled. Every limb is a prosthetic limb. Creativity can happen precisely because of this ontological disability, not in spite of it. Living on is a continual thread, very thin but continual. Creative life is a miracle that can only be achieved by the disabled. Humankind is disabled in an irreducible way.

      LIVE EVIL: PATRIARCHAL LIFE AND OBJECT UNDEATH

      Life (capital L) is hostile to actually existing lifeforms. This is because of a default ontology, a substance ontology, hardwired into social space. It holds that to exist is to be a constantly present something or other beneath or beyond or despite appearances: over yonder, as in the idea of Nature, which also appeared as a function of an agricultural system.

      An algorithm is simply a recipe: take two eggs, beat them, stir in a heated pan with some butter for a few moments—hey presto, a small bowl of scrambled eggs. Settle down in fixed dwellings surrounded by fields, define and repel weeds and pests, maximize the juiciness of your corn kernels at the expense of their flowers … One just needs to leave the algorithm running for a sufficient amount of time, and one can watch as the latest version succeeds in instigating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. Because humans wanted to avoid the mild global warming of the early Holocene, their algorithm ended up generating far, far worse global warming. Because they wanted to transcend the web of fate and the anxiety-provoking loop structure of being, the Paleolithic realm of the Trickster, humans doubled down, further entangling themselves in the web of fate.

      Isn’t this the plot of every tragedy? And not surprisingly, because tragedy is a way for humans to compute agricultural logistics; the computation is necessarily limited, as it’s a symptom of agrilogistics, the logistics of a certain agricultural mode (the Mesopotamian one) and its logical structure.² Logistics are how things are organized and implemented; this organization has an implicit logic that is often occluded. The difference perhaps is similar to the one between acting out and being aware. A glance at the way phosphorus, a major agricultural chemical, has affected the biosphere will be enough to convince anyone of the problems of agrilogistics. The tragic mode in which we are caught vis-á-vis the current ecological emergency is an aesthetic product of the very algorithm that engendered the emergency.

      How can we find our way out of tragedy space? This is a question that, in a larger context, means, how can we find our way out of agrilogistic configuration space, now requiring industry and computing prostheses to maintain its execution? Life as such is a tragic concept. Just think of poor Oedipus, nailed to the side of that mountain: a little baby, barely alive. Life means barely alive.

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