Humankind. Timothy Morton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ works just as well in the Exxon boardroom as it works in the ’70s environmentalist language of “Small Is Beautiful.” Small is beautiful because you are part of a transcendental whole—don’t rock the boat and make too big a splash in the world. Such thought, often fueled by systems theory, deviates from the feudal and Mesopotamian modes only by acephalically distributing power throughout social space, a biopolitics whose apogee is the Nazi concentration camp. The panopticon is a mandala with nothing in the center, fully automated governance. A social order based on ecology might be the most coercive and oppressive social space ever. The association with fascism is obvious. Do we just give up? Or is something wrong with our theory of solidarity?

      Esoteric mandala theory isn’t based on concentric circles at all. According to the esoteric theory—the theory preserved in the VIP lounges of agricultural-age religions—mandalas lack a center or an edge; the concentric-circles model is a reification. Esoteric theory proclaims that it’s not the essentialism of the right-wing mandala that’s the problem, it’s the metaphysics of presence, which defines essences as explosively holistic. No matter how different and disparate my parts are, as a whole I am Tim all the way through and all the way down. Such a belief is deeply at odds with the symbiotic real.

      The struggle for solidarity with nonhumans must therefore include a struggle against the agricultural-age religion that still structures our world, down to the most basic logics of part–whole relations. Western philosophy is a rationalized upgrade of religious discursive space, not unlike how capitalism is an acephalic upgrade of the space of agricultural tyranny. Isn’t this maddening quality the Severing in its most stripped-down, zero-degree mode? Pure exclusion, exclusion for its own sake, without empirical beings to point to that are included and excluded? Including nonhumans in this acephalic space of distributed power would be schizogenic. Exclusion would be everywhere, but would apply to no empirical being in particular. It would be right to run screaming from such a vision of environmentalist utopia.

      Fully transcending theism and its various upgrades would be equivalent to achieving ecological awareness in social, psychic and philosophical space. It would be tantamount to allowing at least some of the symbiotic real to bleed through. Marx argues that communism begins in atheism, and undermining the Severing by subverting theistic thought modes and institutions would necessarily include nonhuman beings in the march toward communism.³² Doing so would be tantamount to abolishing at least one gigantic chunk of private property: nonhuman beings as slaves and food for humans. It would be wrong to see this as giving nonhumans rights, because rights discourse is based on notions of private property. If nothing can be property, then nothing can have rights—simply not appropriating nonhumans would be a quick and dirty (and therefore better) way of achieving what “animal rights” discourses machinate over.

      We are afflicted not only by social conditions but by the ways we think them, which depend often on a set theory that thinks wholes as greater than the sums of their parts. Such a theory turns wholes—community, biosphere (Nature), the universe, the God in whose angry hands we are sinners—into a being radically different from us, transcendentally bigger, a gigantic invisible being that is inherently hostile to little us. We are about to be subsumed, the drop is going to be absorbed into the ocean; Western prejudices about Buddhism are negative thoughts about explosive holism leaking into the thought space conditioned by that very holism, projected onto Eastern religion. Within this fear of absorption into the whole (along with its ecstatic shadow) we discern the traditional patriarchal horror of the simple fact that we came from others: what Bracha Ettinger calls “being towards birth.”³³ Juicing oneself on the uncanny over and over again is a Stockholm syndrome–like repetition (to maintain the rigid real–reality boundary) that we came out of vaginas. The moment at which this fact isn’t a big deal, and so no longer uncanny in the sense of horrifying—though uncanny in the softer sense of being irreducibly strange, because it involves undecidable host–parasite symbiotic logics—is the moment at which imperial neoliberal “Western” patriarchal thought space will have collapsed.

      Communist theory—theories of solidarity, of organizing enjoyment according to what people can offer and to what people need, without a teleological structure (such as property, class, race, gender or species)—should not be maintaining the thought space of Mesopotamian agricultural logistics. The implications are that serious.

      HAUNTING THE SPECTER OF COMMUNISM

      It would be difficult to catalog the profusion of communist incorporations of the nonhuman, and the lack thereof. The nonhuman is a vexed place in Marxist theory, somehow with one foot inside and one foot outside—or any number of paws and tendrils, bewilderingly shifting from inside to outside. Marxism is already haunted by the nonhuman. Anarchism, that pejorative term for a penumbra of multiple communisms that haunt official Marxism, has done much better than the dominant theory. Humankind will be exploring how to add something like the modes of anarchist thought back in to Marxism, like the new medical therapy that consists of injecting fecal matter with helpful bacteria into another’s ailing guts. In particular, anarchism helps to debug communist theory of lingering theisms.

      There are roughly four incorporation modes. What we need is a synoptic view. The fact that one hasn’t been provided yet is evidence that the question of the nonhuman in Marx provokes reactions that are partisan enough to inhibit seeing how the question might be answered: it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees. But if the nonhuman were irrelevant, then there wouldn’t be any telling burn marks from the partisan heat that forces thinkers into one of four positions without being able to consider the possibility space in which the questions are happening.

      Let’s divide the thought region into two: Marx either incorporates nonhumans, or he doesn’t. We’ll call the former “incorporation theory.” The most popular form of incorporation theory is what we might call Marx Already Thought of That, or MATT. MATT presupposes that Marx had with great foresight anticipated possible objections to his arguments. These objections consist in assertions that Marx excluded this or that phenomenon from his theory, and MATT says that even if the phenomena don’t appear explicitly in Marx, Marx is capable of explaining them. MATT is a charitable houseguest in the Marx residence who feels that even if Karl did miss a couple of plates when it was his turn to do the dishes, the great man will get around to them eventually because his style includes addressing those dishes at some point—so what if he’s a bit lazy? He’s meaning to wash those dishes. You just aren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt, or you have a very limited idea of what dishwashing is.³⁴

      Actually, this is Strong MATT. Strong MATT is a staunch defender of Marx’s dishwashing abilities (and topic inclusion). But Strong MATT has a little brother, Weak MATT. Weak MATT still admires Marx’s ability to do the dishes, but he thinks Marx needs a prompt or two on occasion: “Hey, look, you missed a couple of dishes.” Weak MATT thinks Marx is perfectly capable of including those dishes in his routine, but Weak MATT doesn’t believe that Marx will get around to them in his own good time. Weak MATT doesn’t think there’s a gap in Marxian theory regarding nonhumans—Marx did already think of them, otherwise Weak MATT wouldn’t have a name—but Weak MATT believes that if left to run unchecked, Marx wouldn’t get around to talking about them. Weak MATT thinks that adding some nonhumans more explicitly to Marxist theory won’t throw it off, because the basic coordinates of the theory implicitly include them.

      Thus, incorporation theory has strong and weak versions. The way in which Cuba spontaneously began to grow organic food in 1991, during the Período Especial after the Soviet Union collapsed, might be something Weak MATT is happy about. It wasn’t intrinsic to Marxism, but the Communist Party was able to adapt to pressing conditions. Weak MATT recalls that Lenin emphasized the need to flood the soil with as many chemicals as were necessary to sustain agriculture for as many humans as possible.³⁵

      Now, let’s talk about the second half of our ecological thought region, which we’ll call “non-incorporation theory.” We’ll see that non-incorporation theory also divides into strong and weak.

      Unfortunately СКАЧАТЬ