Humankind. Timothy Morton

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СКАЧАТЬ sisters who are less certain of Marx’s ability to pull his weight around the house, the Greek for which is oikos, whence we get the word ecology. The stronger, older cousin, FANNI, is more familiar to us, because she’s popular in the black-and-white thought circles that are definite and rigid about what is the case. FANNI stands for the Feature of Anthropocentrism Is Not Incidental. The older cousin thinks that Marx is an incorrigible anthropocentrist. It’s not that he forgot to include nonhumans, or that he already included them but you didn’t notice; it’s that Marx couldn’t possibly include nonhumans at all. Marx didn’t forget to wash a couple of plates. He is constitutionally incapable of washing those plates because he only looks around the sink for the dirty dishes and never thinks to examine the dining table. And why should he? The older cousin thinks that Marx’s anthropocentrism is a profound feature of his thought. What could nonhumans get from Marx? Sweet FANNI Adams, or, if you’re American, Fuck All. FANNI can be proud that Marx excludes nonhumans, or upset—it doesn’t matter.

      Yet FANNI has a younger, weaker and less popular sister, called ABBI: Anthropocentrism Is a Bug That’s Incidental. Like her less charitable older sister, ABBI also believes that Marx is incapable of washing those plates and that no amount or reminding will do; and like her sister, she’ll never be convinced that Marx was already attending to them, but only we weren’t looking. However, ABBI does hold that given the right tweak—say, she injects Marx with a mind-altering drug—Marx will suddenly turn around, notice the plates and start washing them as if nothing ever happened. She believes that anthropocentrism is a bug, not a feature, of Marxist theory. This book was written by ABBI.

      What we have done here is make a little logic square. ABBI’s position is the inverse of Weak MATT.

      BELOW SYMPATHY, BELOW EMPATHY

      On July 1, 2015, an American dentist called Walter Palmer shot a lion called Cecil, who lived in Zimbabwe. Facebook erupted. Germany and Gabon tabled a UN resolution against the poaching and illegal trafficking of wildlife. The dentist’s address was revealed. He was stalked, shamed, yelled at on-screen and off. Just for a moment put aside thoughts about the common flash-mob moralism that can descend on anyone at any time, like Hitchcock’s birds (it’s called Twitter for a reason). Consider instead the sheer size and scope of the mob and its emotions. Nothing remotely like that happened during the days of “Save the Whale,” the mid to late 1970s. Empathy was what the mob was performing—not just a condescending pity or a handwringing helplessness (who knows or cares whether it’s genuine). Empathy, as a matter of fact, combined with action—again, good or bad, necessary or not, these questions are irrelevant. Sure, Greenpeace started in the 1970s and their Rainbow Warrior intercepted whaling ships. But this was millions of people in the form of a flash-mob Rainbow Warrior going after one very specific person in the name of one very specific lion.

      Zambia’s minister of tourism, Jean Kapata, complained that the West seemed more concerned about a lion than about an African human: “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world.”³⁶ The implication is that the reaction is daft. We’d be right to observe that the reaction bypasses the complex and difficult struggles of African people, or that it’s a blip in the society of the spectacle that doesn’t address real concerns, or how racism frequently leapfrogs over human beings toward nonhumans—Hitler loved his dog, Blondi, and the Nazis passed animal rights legislation. Identifying with a lion means not identifying with a human.

      But does it? There is every reason to ignore the identification, for not only does it appear putatively racist, it’s also childish. Cynical reason wants to find aggressive motives hiding within passionate ones, or motives that aren’t aggressive enough. We’d be right to observe that this is a good example of human identification with what are mockingly called “charismatic megafauna” and which make up a tiny fraction of lifeforms. But this sort of talk is often made in the key of individual guilt and shame about how we appear to other humans.

      Dismissing the incident with Cecil is too easy: there was so much more seething under that mob umbrella than just animal rights or sadistic sympathy. Rights have to do with property and property means “you can dispose of it however you like,” which is exactly what the dentist had done, once the lion had been determined (by human fiat, of course) to be something to which he could do what he wanted. Pity is condescending in precisely the way William Blake outlined: “Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody poor.”³⁷ Sympathy is always a power relationship. This was surely in effect. But so was empathy, which has to do with identification.

      One has to wonder whether the “naïve” pre-theoretical upsurge, in all its symptomatic, spectacular-political failure, was an implicit rejection of the idea of, as the Situationists put it, “a holiday in someone else’s misery,” whether or not that someone was a human or a lion. Exactly at its most “stupid,” the reaction was not about bypassing (African) humans; what it bypassed was the nexus between hunting and tourism, and the way the spectacle the nexus generates keeps an oppressive status quo in place.

      Empathy isn’t as expensive as we suppose. Since I’m not a spirit in a bottle, facing the problem of how to get out of that bottle to act on things that aren’t me, since thinking doesn’t exhaust beings anyway, and since thought isn’t a privileged access mode, we’ve been looking for empathy in the wrong place. An anthropocentric place. Maybe it really is easier to identify with a lion than we thought. Wittgensteinian truisms about lion speech (we could never understand one even if one spoke) are, to risk a mixed metaphor, barking up the wrong tree.³⁸ Understanding, or even being-in-the-same-shoes-as, was never quite the point.³⁹ The point is that no effort at all is required; that whenever effort is brought in, solidarity fades. Adam Smith theorized that aesthetic attunement (reading novels) is a training ground for the ability to identify with other people, and that empathy is the basis for ethics.⁴⁰ Identifying with a fictional character raises the specter disavowed by novelistic realism, the specter of telepathy, in which whose thoughts and feelings I am tuning in to becomes moot, in which the boundaries between me and another are far less rigid than Western thought has supposed.⁴¹ But why would such an effort of training in telepathy (passion at a distance) be possible at all, if we weren’t already an energetic field of connectivity, the symbiotic real and its hum of solidarity? Communist affects are lower than empathy, cheaper and less difficult to access, too easy. The point is to rappel “downwards” through the empathetic part of the capitalist superstructure, to find something still more default than empathy.

      In a dialectical twist, people are now so immiserated that their kinship with nonhumans starts to glow through the screen of Nature, a construct that since about 10,000 BCE has been the malleable substance of human projects—or its modern upgrade, the screen-like surface onto which humans project their desires. At least some humans are now prepared to drop Nature concepts, to achieve solidarity with the beings that actually constitute the biosphere.

      The year 2015 was when a very large number of humans figured out that they had more in common with a lion than with a dentist.

      That human–lion solidarity was achieved through misery might incline us not to accept it, though this is exactly how human–human solidarity is achieved. The reason is anthropocentrism. Marx observes how workers are equated with nonhumans, and he describes it as degradation: “As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.⁴²”

      One perceived obstacle to accepting nonhumans within Marxism is the way in which Marx describes human production in passages such as this. To encounter the nonhuman within capitalism is to have been stripped of one’s human uniqueness. A human being has been reduced to muscles, and muscles have been reduced to replaceable components, simply extensional movement. Consider the examination of Victorian capitalism’s СКАЧАТЬ