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Whoever severs himself from Mother Earth and her flowing sources of life goes into exile.

—Emma Goldman

A specter is haunting the specter of communism: the specter of the nonhuman.

Humankind will argue that the human species is a viable and vital category for thinking communist politics, a politics that this book takes not simply to be international in scope, but planetary. By this is meant that communism only works when its economic models are thought as an attunement to the fact of living in a biosphere, a fact that I call “the symbiotic real.”

The symbiotic real is a weird “implosive whole” in which entities are related in a non-total, ragged way. (I’ll be defining ‘‘implosive holism’’ throughout.) In symbiosis, it’s unclear which is the top symbiont, and the relationship between the beings is jagged, incomplete. Am I simply a vehicle for the numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? The term “host” stems from the Latin hostis, a word that can mean both “friend” and “enemy.”¹

Fully one-third of human milk, for instance, is not digestible by the baby; instead it feeds bacteria that coat the intestines with immunity-bestowing film.² When a child is born vaginally, it gains all kinds of immunities from bacteria in the mother’s microbiome. In the human genome there is a symbiont retrovirus called ERV-3 that codes for immunosuppressive properties of the placental barrier. You are reading this because a virus in your mother’s DNA prevented her body from spontaneously aborting you.³ The loose connectivity of the symbiotic real affects other orders of being, such as language. The opening and closing of suckling mammalian lips around the nipple makes an /m/ sound that is surely the basis of words such as “mamma.” Such words are roughly shared by nonhuman mammals, such as cats, whose meows also evoke this action, a sign they learn to use more frequently as adults when they live with humans.

Relying-on is the uneasy fuel of the symbiotic real; this relying-on always has its haunted aspect, so that a symbiont can become toxic or strange-seeming relationships can form, which is how evolution works. The right word to describe this reliance between discrete yet deeply interrelated beings is “solidarity.” Without the tattered incompletion of the symbiotic real at every scale, solidarity would have no meaning. Solidarity is possible and widely available because it is the phenomenology of the symbiotic real as such. Solidarity is how the symbiotic real manifests, the noise it makes. Solidarity also only works when it is thought at this scale.

In so doing, Humankind pushes against the tendency to exclude nonhumans (that is, “the environment” or “ecological issues”) from the thought domains mapped out by the academic New Left since the mid 1960s. The reasons for this exclusion have to do with a dominant Hegelian strand within these thought domains, a “strong correlationism” that has now persisted past the moment at which it was tactically useful. The usefulness consisted in how strong correlationism provided ways to draw necessary circles around white Western cultures, clipping the wings of their ideological sense of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. The argument Humankind makes has until very recently been left in the hands of conservative forces opposed to “cultural relativism” and “theory.” Conceding an entire region—a very large-scale one at that—to the forces of reaction isn’t tactically viable.

Humankind’s thinking outside the Hegelian culturalist box requires a number of curious, counterintuitive steps that will deter some readers. This book is very possibly going to freak you out. The byline could be, “Yes, it’s possible to include nonhuman beings in Marxist theory—but you’re not going to like it!”

WHERE IS THE ECOLOGICAL PRONOUN?

It should be obvious even this early on that one of the principal enemies of what I here call humankind is humanity itself. Post-Enlightenment thought is correct to wage war against this counterpart of so-called Nature, a vanilla essence consisting of white maleness. (I capitalize Nature to de-nature it, like frying an egg, revealing its artificial constructedness and explosive wholeness.) Humankind is violently opposed both to Humanity and to Nature, which has always been a reified distortion of the symbiotic real. (I will now begin to capitalize Humanity for the same reasons as I capitalize Nature.) As planetary awareness continues at breakneck speed to interrupt the propagation of the Humanity–Nature dyad, it is tempting to write big-picture books that deceptively address all humans at all times, while predictably arguing for a teleological account of accelerating success and progress toward a transhuman singularity of electronic enhancements to the Humanity substance.⁴ Such books are popular worldwide because they inhibit the true ecological awareness.

Humankind is an ecological being that can be found in the symbiotic real. Can I give voice to it in this book?

There is no pronoun entirely suitable to describe ecological beings. If I call them “I,” then I’m appropriating them to myself or to some pantheistic or Gaia concept that swallows them all without regard to their specificity. If I call them “you,” I differentiate them from the kind of being that I am. If I call them “he” or “she,” then I’m gendering them according to heteronormative concepts that are untenable on evolutionary terms. If I call them “it,” I don’t think they are people like me and I’m being blatantly anthropocentric. Ironically, conventional ecological speech talks in terms of “it” and “they,” abstract populations stripped of appearances. Ethical and political speech either becomes impossible or begins to sound like deeply fascist biopolitics. Humans even talk about humans that way: “the human race” is an undifferentiated “it.” Relying on biology alone would mean defining humans as the best among mammals at throwing and sweating.⁵

And heaven forbid I call them “we,” because of the state of polite scholarship. What am I doing speaking as if we all belong together without regard to cultural difference? What am I doing extending this belonging to nonhumans, like a hippie who never heard that doing so is appropriating the Other? As one respondent enjoyed sneering a few years ago, “Who is the ‘we’ in Morton’s prose?”

If grammar lines up against speaking ecological beings at such a basic level, what hope is there?

I cannot speak the ecological subject, but this is exactly what I’m required to do. I can’t speak it because language, and in particular grammar, is fossilized human thoughts: thoughts, for example, about humans and nonhumans. I can’t say “it” as opposed to “he” or “she,” as I’ve just argued. I can’t say we. I can’t say they.

Sure, I can in some sense speak about lifeforms if I ignore the most interesting question, which is, How do I get to coexist with them? To what extent? In what mode or modes? I can practice biology, for example. But if I’m a biologist I base my research on existing assumptions concerning what counts as alive. And implicitly, as a possibility condition for science as such, I’m talking in the key of “it” and “them” rather than the key of “we.” So, I haven’t made the problem go away.

Right now, in my part of the academy, I’m not allowed to like “We Are All Earthlings,” that song by the Muppets, let alone sing it as if it were some kind of biospheric anthem. I’m supposed to condemn it as deeply white and Western, and so appropriative of indigenous cultures and blithely ignorant of racial and gender difference. I’m trying to make the academy a safe space in which to like “We Are All Earthlings.” This boils down to thinking hard about the “we.”

Ironically, the first scholars in humanist and social science domains to talk about ecology were hostile to theory. They latched on to ecological themes so as to leapfrog over what they didn’t like about the contemporary academy, which have always been the things I like and like to teach: exploring how texts and other cultural objects are constructed, how race, gender and class deeply affect their construction, and so forth. They wrote as if talking about frogs was a way to avoid talking about gender. But frogs also have gender and sexuality. Frogs also have constructs—they access the world in certain ways, their genome expresses (whether “intentionally” or “with imagination” or not) beyond the boundaries of their bodies. In a strange way, then, the early ecocritics were themselves talking about nonhumans in the key of “it”! In drawing a sharp distinction between the artificial and the natural, they remained well within anthropocentric thought space. Humans are artificers; nonhumans are spontaneous. Humans are people; nonhumans are, for all intents and purposes, machines. The ecocritics have hated me for saying it.

I’m not playing ball with either of these sections of the record store of popular intellectual opinion. I’m not going to leapfrog over theory. I’m not going to keep my trap shut about coral. I’m going to be the devil again, and insist that Marxism can include nonhumans—must include nonhumans.

WHAT’S BUGGING MARX?

Economics is how lifeforms organize their enjoyment. That’s why ecology used to be called the economy of nature.⁶ When you think of it like that, what the discipline of economics excludes is nonhuman beings—the ways we and they organize enjoyment with reference to one another. If we want to organize communist enjoyment, we are going to have to include nonhuman beings.

Capitalist economic theory is far worse at including nonhumans. Anything considered to be outside of human social space, whether supposed to be alive or not (rivers or pandas), is considered to be a mere “externality.” There is no way to include them in a way that doesn’t reproduce an inside–outside opposition untenable in an age of ecological awareness, in which categories such as “away” have evaporated. One doesn’t throw a candy wrapper away—one drops it on Mount Everest. Capitalist economics is an anthropocentric discourse that cannot factor in the very things that ecological thought and politics require: nonhuman beings and unfamiliar timescales.⁷

Marxism isn’t being singled out for special treatment in Humankind. Indeed, I’m going to be showing how, with its theories of alienation and use-value, Marxism holds out more promise of ways to include nonhumans than capitalist theory. Such concepts don’t so critically depend on a labor theory of value snagged in ideas about property that are ineffective at scales on which humans are just one lifeform among many, beings whose enjoyment considerations are on the same footing.

But in practice, Marxism hasn’t included nonhumans. Consider the following sentence, which indicates Marx’s commitment to an anti-ecological concept of “away”: “The coal burnt under the boiler vanishes without leaving a trace; so too the oil with which the axles of the wheels are greased.”⁸ And communist solutions to ecological-scale problems have so far strongly resembled capitalist ones: put more fertilizer in the soil, become more efficient … This is the kind of thing that reactionary ecocriticism used to observe in the early 1990s: the Soviets and the capitalists are just as bad as the other, green is neither left nor right. So, I understand why it might be disconcerting to find sentences like that one in a Verso book.

Since capitalism relies on the appropriation of what are handily called “externalities” (indigenous lands, women’s bodies, nonhuman beings), communism must resolve to not appropriate and externalize such beings. It seems fairly simple put like that.⁹ Unfortunately, including nonhumans in Marxist thought will just be disconcerting, and there is a good reason for this.

You can argue about Marx’s relation to ecological issues in various ways. The most popular is a theological mode in the key of Hegel: Marx was already there, and he anticipated everything we can now say about ecology. The other approach condescendingly extends Marxism to nonhumans: Marxism is flawed because it doesn’t include them, but we can allow at least some of them in, subject to an entry requirement.

Humankind’s approach begins by being honest: Marx is an anthropocentric philosopher. But is that intrinsic to his thought? Humankind is going to argue that it’s a bug, not a feature. What happens when we remove the bug?

The bug was hugely exacerbated in New Left theory domains. Environment is not quite the same as race or gender, because these domains are “strongly correlationist” and therefore irreducibly anthropocentric. Correlationism has been part of the Western philosophical consensus since Kant. It’s how science functions, as well as the humanities, so playing with it or rejecting it involves tackling some very deeply ingrained strictures on what counts as thinking and what counts as true. Still, it is being done, the very doing of which might be a symptom of incipient planetary awareness beyond awareness of global capitalism. The speculative realism movement that has been prominent since the mid 2000s might be symptomatic.

Correlationism means that there are things in themselves (as Kant would put it), but that they aren’t “realized” until they are correlated by a correlator, in the same way a conductor might “realize” a piece of music by conducting it. The correlatee requires a correlator to make it real: sure, things exist in some inaccessible sense, but things aren’t strictly real until they’ve been accessed by a correlator. For Kant, the correlator is what he calls the transcendental subject. This subject tends to be found hovering invisibly behind the heads of only one entity in the actually existing universe—the human being.

There are things, and there’s thing data. Raindrops are wet and splashy and spherical, but this data is not the actual raindrop—it’s how you access the raindrop when it falls on your human head.¹⁰ If you think about it carefully, the idea that there is a correlator and a correlatee, and a drastic, transcendental gap between them (you can’t point to it), is disturbing. It means, in its most extreme formulation—the one Kant gives but himself ignores—that things are exactly as they appear (they always coincide with their data) but never as they seem (they never coincide with their data). This is a blatant contradiction, and contradictions aren’t allowed in conventional Western philosophy.

Kant had accepted Hume’s sabotage of the default Western metaphysical concept that cause and effect were easy to identify mechanical operations happening below appearances in some reliable way. According to this, cause and effect are statistical; you can’t with a straight face say that one billiard ball will always hit another one and “cause” it to move. Kant gives the deep reason for this: cause and effect are on the side of data, appearances rather than part of the thing in itself; they are phenomena that we intuit about a thing based on a priori judgment. If you think this is outrageous or bizarre, remember that this is just exactly the logic of modern science. It’s why global warming scientists are constrained to broadcasting a percentage concerning the likelihood that humans caused it. It allows us to study things with great precision, unhampered by metaphysical baggage. But it also means that science can never directly talk about reality, only about data.

Kant unleashed a picture of the world in which things have a deeply ambiguous quality. Now, we could accept that some things can be contradictory and true, and so accept that things are what they are yet never as they appear. Or, we could try to get rid of the contradiction. Kant himself pins down the problem by limiting access to data to thinking—or at least positing thinking as the top access mode—and by limiting thinking to mathematizing reason (regarding extensional time and space) happening within the transcendental (human) subject. Raindrops aren’t really weird all by themselves: there is a gap, but it’s not in the raindrop (despite how Kant actually puts it when he talks about them); the gap is in the difference between the (human) subject and everything else.

But even this “weak correlationist” gap was too much for Hegel. For Hegel, the difference between what a thing is and how it appears is internal to the subject, which in the largest sense for him is Geist, that magical Slinky that can go up stairs all the way to the top, where the Prussian state hangs out. The thing in itself is totally foreclosed, thought of only as an artifact of the strong correlationist thought space. Abracadabra! There is no problem, because now the subject is the grand decider of what gets to count as real! The gap isn’t irreducible; at certain moments in the historical progression of thought it might look as if there is a gap, but not forever. This is strong correlationism. Philosophers have volunteered a variety of beings to be the decider. For Hegel, it’s Spirit, the necessarily historical unfolding of its self-knowing. For Heidegger, it’s Dasein, which he irrationally restricts to human beings, and even more irrationally (on his own terms, even) to German human beings most of all. For Foucault, it’s power-knowledge that makes things real.

Correlationism is like a mixing desk in a music recording studio. It has two faders: the correlator and the correlatee. Strong correlationism turns the correlator fader all the way up and the correlatee fader all the way down. Thus arises from strong correlationism the culturalist idea that culture (or discourse or ideology or …) makes things real. The similarity between all the “deciders” is that they are all human—a major error on Heidegger’s part, since Dasein is what produces the category “human” as such, not the other way around. You can easily see the circularity in Heidegger’s case. Strong correlationism is anthropocentric: any attempt to include nonhumans is ruled out in advance. The correlator has all the power. The correlatee is reduced to a blank screen. Is a blank screen really an improvement on a colorless lump of pure extensionality, which is what things had been according to the default, pre-Kantian, Aristotelian ontology? At least colorless lumps don’t have to wait around for whatever movie the decider is projecting onto them to know what they are and how to behave.

Sensitive to cultural difference, the strong correlationist allows other people to include nonhumans, but this also means that these other people aren’t very acceptable to them. This dynamic has affected left thinking because strong correlationism got hardwired into it, not only because of the obvious Hegelian strand in Marx, but also because of the strong correlationist lineage of “theory.” Foucault studied with Lacan, who was a Heideggerian as well as a Hegelian, for example. Arguments for the inclusion of race and gender along with class were staged from the strong correlationist platform: race and gender are culturally constructed, so rethinking culture—or the restructuring of culture dependent on reformatting the economic structure or base—requires reconfiguring race and gender. Talking about things not coinciding with their correlated appearances might smack of essentialism. Correlatees, seen as “nature,” are never seen as part of the mix, because they only exist because of the (human) correlator. These correlatees include humans themselves, thought of as biological entities or as “species,” as well as nonhumans. Step one of including nonhumans in political, psychic and philosophical space must therefore consist in a thorough deconstruction of the concept of “nature.” It only sounds counterintuitive because of the anthropocentric ways in which we think. The anti-theory philistine ecocritics and the pro-theory “cool kids” are really aspects of the same syndrome. Either nothing is socially constructed, or everything is, and in both cases “socially” means “by humans.”

I prefer to throw my hat in the ring with the cool kids. You can’t really bomb thinking back to the days before Hume, when, if you were Doctor Johnson, you could kick a stone to refute an argument, as if what those considering how things may not just naïvely exist needed was just a good slap upside the head. The trouble is, turning up the fader on the correlatee—whereas Hegel had turned it all the way down—is ridiculed as essentialism. This might be a way to rationalize a fear that such a move actually wouldn’t be regressive but simply non-Hegelian, returning thinking not to a state before Hume but to just after him, to Kant. Instead of freaking out and papering over the human–world gap, we could go the other way and allow the gap to exist, which in the end means that Kant’s way of containing the explosiveness of his idea must also be let go. In turn, this means that we release the anthropocentric copyright control on the gap and allow everything in the universe to have it, which means dropping the idea that (human) thought is the top access mode and holding that brushing against, licking or irradiating are also access modes as valid (or as invalid) as thinking.

Adorno argues that true progress looks like regression.¹¹ Stepping outside the charmed circle of the decider is seen as absurd or dangerous, as louche essentialism, as a whole style, not just as a set of ideas. The person who would do that isn’t the person you want to be if you’re trained in theory class: some kind of hippie. Of course, in reality race, gender and environmentality are deeply intertwined, as the strong correlationist New Leftist will admit when it becomes tactically necessary to talk about the environment as, for instance, a discursively (in the Foucauldian sense) produced feature of social space. But this sidesteps the elephant in the room—the literal elephant in the room. Social space is always already construed as human—the one constructed thing that one can’t interfere with is the level at which we start to turn up the fader on the correlatee.

Speaking of hippies, destructuring Western philosophy to include nonhumans in a meaningful way starts to look, from within culturalism, like appropriating non-Western cultures, and in particular the cultures of First Peoples, indigenous people. If it’s not possible to cross from one decider’s domain to another, it is because they are totally different realities; the correlatee fader has been turned way down to the point where correlatees are only blank screens, so crossing from one decider’s domain to another’s must violate a basic rule of decorum. Despite the fact that some Western philosophers are allowing non-Western thought to influence them, and despite the fact that this allowance in part disarms the bomb to make the world a safer place, what this looks like to some is doing the unforgivable, gauche, hippie thing of dressing up like a Native American. If I were Oscar Wilde, that deliciously aestheticist and paradoxical socialist, I might archly observe that it looks to the culturalist bad enough to cross over to another’s culture without permission, and even worse to be so unstylishly dressed.

These critiques miss the target because they rely on an idea of the incommensurability of cultures. This idea stems from strong correlationism (Hegel). Strong correlationism is equated with imperialism: cultural difference can be used to justify imposing an alien bureaucratic power layer on top of an existing indigenous culture, for example. The critique of crossing over, or of arguing for commensurability, is a symptom of the very imperialism from which one is trying to rescue thinking by departing from strong correlationist orthodoxy. How ironic is that?

One view to which I adhere is object-oriented ontology, or OOO. I have described already its basic move of releasing the anthropocentric copyright control on who or what gets to be a correlator, rather than regressing to pre-Kantian essentialism. OOO has been subjected precisely to this criticism, that it is appropriating indigenous cultures when it talks about nonhumans as “agents” or “lively.” It is as if white Western thought is required to remain white, Western and patriarchal in order to provide an easy-to-identify target. The net effect is an ironic situation in which nothing can change, because it would be wrong for someone in that lineage not to sound like that. The Hegelianism structuring both imperialist and anti-imperialist thought domains is like a highly sensitive laser motion detector, stepping over which sets off loud alarms that make it impossible to hear oneself think. As you enter the humanities building, you had better burn the hippie gear you were wearing on the avenue outside and put on the black-on-black costume of stagehands who see through the naïvety of the actors, or you will end up pathologized and thus incapable of being seen or heard.

But allowing for others to exist in some strong sense, joining their ways of accessing things or at least appreciating them, just is solidarity. Solidarity requires having something in common. But having something in common is exactly what culturalism sees as essentialism, and thus as reactionary primitivism. How do you get there—solidarity—from here—the strong correlationism that lords over Marxist, anti-imperialist and imperialist thought domains? Perhaps having something in common is a spurious, dangerous concept? Perhaps we could reimagine solidarity without having anything in common? This is the popular approach from within strong correlationism. Or perhaps—and this is Humankind’s approach—we could reimagine what “to have in common” means. I chose the title Humankind as a deliberate provocation to those scholars who think that “having in common” is based on ideas that are less acceptable than farting in church.

THE SEVERING

“Solidarity” is an intriguing word. It describes a state of physical and political organization, and it describes a feeling.¹² This itself is significant because “solidarity” cuts against a dominant ontological trend, default since the basic social, psychic and philosophical foreclosure of the human–nonhuman symbiotic real that we call the Neolithic.¹³ Let’s think up a dramatic Game of Thrones–sounding name for it. Let’s call it “the Severing.” Why such a dramatic name? What the Severing names is a trauma that some humans persist in reenacting on and among ourselves (and obviously on and among other lifeforms). The Severing is a foundational, traumatic fissure between, to put it in stark Lacanian terms, reality (the human-correlated world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman parts of the biosphere). Since nonhumans compose our very bodies, it’s likely that the Severing has produced physical as well as psychic effects, scars of the rip between reality and the real. One thinks of the Platonic dichotomy of body and soul: the chariot and the charioteer, the chariot whose horses are always trying to pull away in another direction.¹⁴ The phenomenology of First Peoples points in this direction, but left thought hasn’t been looking that way, fearful of primitivism, a concept that inhibits thinking outside agrilogistic parameters.¹⁵

The starkness of the Lacanian model is itself an artifact of the Severing, derived from Hegel’s defensive reaction against the shockwave sent by Kant’s correlationist ontology. Humankind will cleave closer to Jean-François Lyotard’s way of thinking the difference between the correlatee and the correlator. For Lyotard, the real–reality boundary must be spongy. Stuff leaks through such that the real manifests not just as gaps and inconsistencies in reality. There is a loose, thick, wavy line between things and their phenomena, expressed in the dialectical tension between what Lyotard calls “discourse” and what he calls “figure.” Figure can bleed into discourse, by which Lyotard means something physical, nonrepresentational, silent in the sense that Freud describes the drives as silent.¹⁶

Worlds are perforated and permeable, which is why we can share them. Entities don’t behave exactly as their accessor wants them to behave, since no access mode will completely shrink-wrap them. So, worlds must be full of holes. Worlds malfunction intrinsically. All worlds are “poor,” not just those of sentient nonhuman lifeforms (“animals,” as Heidegger calls them). This means that human worlds are not different in value from nonhuman ones, and also that non-sentient nonhuman lifeforms (as far as we know) and non-life (and also by implication the non-sentient and non-living parts of humans) also have worlds.

Something like a permeable boundary between things and their phenomena is highly necessary for thinking solidarity. If solidarity is the noise made by the uneasy, ambiguous relationship between 1 + n beings (for instance, the always ambiguous host–parasite relationship), then solidarity is the noise made by the symbiotic real as such. So, solidarity is very cheap because it is default to the biosphere and very widely available. Humans can achieve solidarity among themselves and between themselves and other beings because solidarity is the default affective environment of the top layers of Earth’s crust. If non-life can have a world, then at the very least we can allow lifeforms to have solidarity.

But nothing like knowledge of this could leak through a thin, rigid boundary between reality and the real. Such a boundary depends on a smoothly bounded, impermeable human world: on anthropocentrism. How can humans achieve solidarity even among themselves if massive parts of their social, psychic and philosophical space have been cordoned off? Like a gigantic, very heavy object such as a black hole, the Severing distorts all the decisions and affinities that humans make. Difficulties of solidarity between humans are therefore also artifacts of repressing and suppressing possibilities of solidarity with nonhumans.

Children are just as traumatized when a nonhuman is abused in the home as when is a human.¹⁷ A functional definition of “child” is “someone who is still allowed to talk with an inanimate stuffed animal as if it were not only an actual lifeform but also conscious.” A functional definition of an adult book is one in which nonhumans don’t speak and aren’t on an equal footing with humans. The genre of young adult fiction proves the point: the young adult is precisely an anthropocentrist in training. The human–nonhuman separation is expressed as a psychic trauma objectified in the arbitrary definition of “child.” The fact that this definition is everywhere in modern global social space indicates the profundity of its violence and the depth of its age. Other artifacts include Freud’s concept of psychoanalysis as the draining of the Zuiderzee, turning saltmarsh into farmland (the logical conclusion of which is desertification); or Saint Paul’s definition of being grown up, in, “I put away childish things.” We are supposed to get behind the idea that playing is a way to adjust to reality, so that eventually we can chuck away the teddy bear like Wittgenstein’s ladder. By the age of ten, we have already decided that literature should not be about talking toasters or friendly frogs. Such entities are at best labeled “transitional objects” that allow one to mature from play to reality, itself a telling opposition.¹⁸

The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place “at” a certain “point” in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, in whose wake we are caught. We are caught in the Oxygen Catastrophe that began over three billion years ago, the ecological crisis created by bacteria excreting oxygen, which is why you can breathe as you read this sentence. The Oxygen Catastrophe is happening now. In the same way, the Severing is happening now.

Hiding in very plain sight, everywhere in post-agricultural psychic, social and philosophical space, is evidence of a traumatic Severing of human–nonhuman relations. The difference between modernity and deep premodernity (Paleolithic cultures) is simply that sophisticated technological instruments and contemporary science tell us explicitly that the Severing is produced at the expense of actually existing biospheric beings and their relations. What we are dealing with is a becoming-species, a consciousness that we are humans inhabiting a planet, that has happened precisely as the inner logic of the Severing has unfolded such that, until now, there have been drastic dislocations and distortions in that consciousness and in the concept of “human.” We are human insofar as every quality of being human has been severed from a central, neutral substance that Enlightenment patriarchy was happy to call Man.

Intergenerational trauma is a profound topic in psychoanalysis. Children nearing Santa Claus in New York department stores in 2001 (after the World Trade Center attack) were observed to be clutched hard by their parents, transmitting fear rather than love.¹⁹ The grandchildren of Holocaust victims have been observed to suffer from psychological conditions influenced by the traumas of two previous generations. The history of a thing is nothing but the record of all the accidents, whose primordial form is trauma, that occur to a thing. Deep in the structure of the universe are bruise-like concatenations of the universal microwave background that suggest to some scientists an ancient “bubble collision” of two or more universes. Our scientific instruments tell us what old stories told us too, that humans and nonhumans are deeply interconnected. But our ways of playing and our speech say something quite different. The amalgam of these two contradictory planes (what we know and how we talk and behave with regard to nonhumans) must give rise to immense social, psychic and philosophical intensities.

Perhaps melancholia is popular among aesthetes because we carry with us the constantly reenacted 12,500-year trauma of the Severing. Perhaps this is why Adorno remarks that true progress would look like a regression to the childishly passionate—weeping along with a horse being punished, like Nietzsche, is his example.²⁰ Humans have indeed been alienated from something, but not from some stable, bland underlying essence—this mythical beast, the lump called Man (and its uncanny spectral shadow, the abject Müsselmäner of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz, who merely live on rather than surviving in some meaningful sense), is just the by-product of the logic of the Severing. The alienation is a crack in social, psychic and philosophical ties to the biosphere, a hyperobject teeming with trillions of component beings. Our story about how we have been alienated is itself an alienated artifact of the Severing! We have been alienated not from consistency but from inconsistency.

The world of the perpetrator of trauma is drastically depleted. The Severer experiences what one psychoanalyst describes as a desert landscape—a telling image from the overkill intensity of the logistics of post-Neolithic agriculture.²¹ It will become highly significant in Humankind that logistics are recipes, which is to say that they are algorithms. An algorithm is automated human “style,” in the very broad sense in which phenomenology means it. Style is one’s overall appearance, not just the parts of which you’re in control; not a choice (certainly not a fashion choice), but the mode in which one appears, and not just in a visual sense, but in all physical (and other) senses. Style is the past, appearance is the past, a fact that has deep ontological reasons (as we will see). Thus, an algorithm is a snapshot of a past series of modes of humankind, like a musical score. The algorithms that dominate stock trading mean that capitalist exchange is caught in the past: no matter how fast it moves, it’s standing still, like the nightmare in which you are running as fast as you can, getting nowhere. The future is foreclosed.

An algorithm is an automated past: past “squared” if you like, because appearance is already the past. “The tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”²² To run a society (or anything) purely in an algorithmic mode is to be caught in the past. Self-driving cars will be programmed to save the driver or save the pedestrians if there’s an accident: each mode will represent a past state of human style—driving will be caught in the past. PTSD is evidently automated human behavior resulting from a trauma that ripped a hole in the victim’s psyche. The PTSD victim is caught in the past to the power of two. White Western humankind is frozen in the past with regard to nonhumans.

Working with victims of militarized trauma, an analyst argues that the perpetrator has crossed a line of life-binding and life-affirming identifications into a world where the death drive rules.²³ Trauma is experienced as a blank or gap in memory, where the death drive protects the victim against the intensity of the trauma. The Severer inhabits a literal and psychic (and philosophical) desert, from which meaning and connection have evaporated. In the Book of Genesis, the agricultural world is imagined as dust in which the worker labors with great pain, while the preagricultural Eden with its rich affordances is forever sealed off. The inevitability of the sealing-off is itself a symptom of the death-driven agricultural program, ensuring, like selective amnesia, that the traumatic Severing cannot be directly experienced, and so not traversed and resolved. It explains why attempts to do so are seen as childish, regressive, or ridiculous—precisely because they are appropriate.

A LEFT HOLISM

Solidarity must mean human psychic, social and philosophical being resisting the Severing. This is not as hard as it seems because the basic symbiotic real requires no maintaining by human thought or psychic activity. Western philosophy has been telling itself that humans, in particular human thought, makes things real for so long that an ethics or politics based simply on allowing something real to impinge on us sounds absurd or impossible. Solidarity, a thought and a feeling and a physical and political state, seems in its pleasant confusion of feeling-with and being-with, appearing and being, phenomena and thing, active and passive, not simply to gesture to this non-severed real, but indeed to emerge from it. Solidarity is a deeply pleasant, stirring feeling and political state, and it is the cheapest and most readily available because it relies on the basic, default symbiotic real. Since solidarity is so cheap and default, it extends to nonhumans automatically.

Solidarity also restarts temporality. Solidarity means being freed from one’s being caught in the past and to have entered a vibrant nowness in which the future opens. I will explore this later.

“Solidarity” is a word used for the “fact” (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) of “being perfectly united or at one.” And solidarity is also used for the constitution of a group as such, the example given being the notorious notion of “the human race,” aka species, what is now called the “Anthropos” of the dreaded Anthropocene, a new geological era (officially dated to 1945) marked by human-made materials such as plastics, nucleotides and concretes in the upper layers of Earth’s crust.²⁴ Existing thought protocols in the humanities make this geological era look like an embarrassing generalization, an Enlightenment horror that strips historical specificity, race, class and gender from the human. The concept of species as such, lurking behind the notion of the Anthropocene, seems violently antique, like a rusty portcullis.

To add insult to injury, solidarity can mean “community,” and this term is also compromised by notions of full presence and volkisch sentiments. Solidarity presses all the wrong buttons for us educated people. No wonder Hardt and Negri spend so much time finessing it into a diffuse deterritorial feeling at the end of their magnum opus, Empire.²⁵ Contemporary solidarity theories want it to be as un-solid and as un-together as possible. They want the community of those who have nothing in common, or a community of unworking or inoperation.²⁶ Heaven forbid that we feel something in common. On the other hand, scholars have become fascinated with the effortless emergence of commonality, as long as it is not too personal; systems, and how they emerge magically from simple differences that, in the Batesonian lingo, make a difference. How the hermeneutical frame of “making a difference” is established in advance (as it must, in order for the differentiating mark to start to work its magic) always eludes systems theories.

We are either resisting an agricultural-age religion by waging war against what we consider to be essentialism; or we are promoting agricultural-age religion by other means, by marveling at the miracle of self-creating entities that emerge from a primordial non-marked chaos. In either case, we are operating with reference to agricultural religion, which is the initial experiential, social and thought mode of the Severing, a massive privatization of access to the real. Only the monarch, a divinely appointed displacement of human powers, has the hotline to a virtual version of him or herself, a further displacement of those powers. Houston, we have a problem.

Why the allergy to positive, juicy, robust-seeming solidarity? Is the allergy itself a symptom of the Severing? Claude Lévi-Strauss describes an experiment in which the upper and lower class of an indigenous society were asked to draw a simple picture of social space. The ruling-class people drew a simple mandala-like form consisting of concentric circles: the inside is differentiated sharply from the outside, and this difference is repeated inside social space. By contrast, the lower-class people drew a circle with a line running down the middle: an internal fissure (black and white, upper- and lower-class, rich and poor …).²⁷

Figure 1. Contradicting Views of Social Space Keyed to Class

The ruling- and lower-class views are radically asymmetrical. Upper- and lower-class people live in totally different kinds of social space: their ontological structure is profoundly different. In the upper-class case, intact, essentialist beings (the “Real People”) are surrounded and threatened by forces from the outside that are less human, inhuman, or nonhuman. My use of the term “inhuman” refers to extensionally intimate or proximate parts of what discourse or language or power-knowledge (or Dasein, or Spirit, and so on) classifies as “human” that do not fall easily or even at all under that category. Extensionally spatial proximity is anthropocentrically scaled. Or, what seems proximate to the human morphologically is distinguished finely as inhuman: this is the essence of racism. Via the inhuman a distinction is drawn between the human and the nonhuman that is ontic (you can point to it).²⁸

Now we can begin to glimpse the ecological resonance of the ruling-class model, and its traditional agricultural-city format: a walled city, surrounded by fields, surrounded by “the wild.” If solidarity can include nonhumans, how can we get there from here without recourse to the ruling-class mandala? Wouldn’t solidarity mean being solid, an essentialized ball of elect beings defending against an outside? Where on earth is this outside if social space now includes the nonhuman? Ironically, traditional ecological models rely on the ruling-class mandala structure. These exclude the ecological either by constructing a category of the inhuman, a spectral quality that is neither strictly human nor nonhuman. Nature gets to mean something pristine and pure, an endlessly exploitable resource or majestic backdrop to the doings of the (human) folk.

What is the default characteristic of this thought mode? Let’s call it “explosive holism”: a belief, never formally proven but retweeted all the time, that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. The alternatives are limited. You are a traditional theist or into cybernetics (or any other deployments of this concept); or you are the kind who shows their behind to the political father, as Roland Barthes put it.²⁹ You are either in church or you are thumbing your nose at church. In either case, there is a church. It’s one big reason why talk about populations, which is ecological talk, is considered highly suspicious on the academic left. The population concept definitely has no time for its parts, otherwise known as people such as you and me. This is the utilitarian version of explosive holism, and its near monopoly on talk of species is rightly concerning. But if we can’t talk about something like it at all, for fear of sounding like eugenicists or social Darwinists, a left ecology is a fruitless dream. How to proceed?

One very obvious instance of explosive holism is the concept of the invisible hand, developed in Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism and first promulgated by Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees, the subtitle of which is Private Vices, Public Benefits. That difference between private and public is a metaphysical difference between parts and wholes that is also a difference between lesser and greater. The invisible hand has evident theistic overtones, conjuring up images of divine providence. Capitalist ideology has relied strongly on explosive holism. The invisible hand concept is emergent and teleological. A benevolent group telos is said to emerge from the selfish actions of individuals. From this teleology springs social Darwinism, which differs from actual Darwinism on this key point, the strong sense of “survival of the fittest,” a phrase of Herbert Spencer’s inserted into The Origin of Species out of fear for the implications otherwise. Selfish, greedy aggression is good in the long run.

The second obvious contemporary instance of explosive holism is fascism. The Latin term fascis means a bundle of sticks, expressing the bundling of the folk in a whole that transcends its parts and gives it a firm, constantly present depth. Notice the agricultural provenance of this image: it’s not an accident, and not simply in the sense that there is an ideology of the rural versus the urban (black, Jewish, or Islamic social space, and so on). There is an ideology of agricultural social space as such, agriculture as it was conceived in the Fertile Crescent. Agricultural space must be kept together, precisely because of the obvious ways in which, as soon as it starts up, it causes social space to be torn apart: patriarchy, hierarchy, desertification. An underlying aspect of this rip in social space is the Severing, the walling off of human space from the symbiotic real. This walling off gives rise to the duality of humans plus their nonhuman, proprietary cattle (chattels and capital derive from this term). Cattle are sharply differentiated from humans. This is evidently not how the symbiotic real actually works, via uncanny affiliations that can never be stabilized, bundled into fasces.

Does this rip in social space mean that lovely, organic, indigenous (and also explosively) holist Edenic prehistory has been torn apart? Far from it. What humans did was to sever their ties to an implosive, ultimately meaningless and contingent symbiotic real. The violence of post-Mesopotamian civilization is precisely not a deracination from Nature. The violence is the establishment of a human “world,” cozy, seemingly self-contained and explosively holist, walled off from the disturbing/wonderful paranoid play of the symbiotic real. A world bounded by wild Nature on its physical outside, and by Eden on its historical outside. Humankind is not a fragmented being trying to stitch itself back together again into Adam Kadmon or Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Severing consists precisely in the stitching-together itself, one of whose logical conclusions is fascism; a schizophrenic defense against the void of the symbiotic real. Religion in this sense is the prototype of anti-Semitism, a conspiracy theory (Fall narratives, for example) that provides a reason for the weird palpations and shifty affiliations, the illusory play and physical intensity of the symbiotic real.

Cutting forward an eyelash-flutter more of geological time, what happened is as follows. Neoliberalism turned social space into a wafer-thin sheet through the gauze of which could be glimpsed the wafer-thin sheet of a planet ravaged by neoliberalism. This double void provoked an intense regressive reaction, akin to the schizophrenic defense, in which non-white, non-male humans are dehumanized and made inhuman, thus opening up an Uncanny Valley across whose foreshortened-to-nothing space anthropocentrism sees the decisively nonhuman Other. (We’ll explore the Uncanny Valley in greater detail later in this book.)

Inside the mandala of social space, Real People (with essentialist capital letters) exist. Solidarity with nonhumans would be equivalent to allowing nonhumans into a club, of inclusion versus exclusion. If there is no “outside” to actually existing ecological space, since the symbiotic real has no certain center or edge (Where do you, where can you draw the line when you think interdependence?), how on earth does this exclusive club function? If your picture of solidarity is explicitly or secretly based on this ontology of social space, it’s not really left-wing, and it’s not really going to work—and it definitely won’t be able to include nonhumans. The inside–outside difference is foundational to metaphysics.³⁰ The falsity of an inside–outside model is becoming more obvious as we enter an age of increasing knowledge concerning the seemingly obvious fact that that we live on a planet. Where on earth is “away” when we have planetary awareness? One’s garbage doesn’t go “away”—it just goes somewhere else; capitalism has tended to create an “away” that is (fortunately) no longer thinkable.³¹

If there is no inside–outside boundary, social space must already include nonhumans, albeit unconsciously. Thus, its contradictions must be structural: they transcend empirical differences. It’s not the case that there are “real” or “more real” beings toward the center of a mandala of concentric circles. It’s that differences are always arbitrarily produced by acts of violence (social, psychic and philosophical) on beings that cannot in any sense be arbitrarily divided in such ways (hence the violence).

The crack in social space is an artifact of the Severing. Trying to visualize how the world (“reality,” or how we access the real) would look if it wasn’t there is almost taboo. The taboo means that at some point our visualization defaults to the right-wing circle. Visualize just a circle without a crack—again, this is impossible since there is no inside–outside boundary! Solidarity would then begin to mean something like religious communion, the circle of the elect protected from the beings they excluded in some way. We claim that human solidarity couldn’t be like that because we claim that differences are irreducible without violence. But if someone starts considering whether porpoises can be part of revolutionary struggle, some will balk and default to a view that looks like the mandala of concentric circles.

Humankind requires a new theory of violence.

Explosive holism whispers in our ear that religious communion is precisely what solidarity means, because social space is greater than the sum of its parts. And this only works if we cleave in some sense to agricultural religion. And agricultural religion is one of the most basic ways in which agricultural society talks about itself—agricultural society, which is based on the Severing. Our very image of solidarity is predicated on never achieving solidarity with nonhumans!

Solidarity with nonhumans becomes radically impossible: it mustn’t be achieved, otherwise something very basic will fall apart. You can’t get there from here—so “stewardship” and other varieties of command-control (ultimately religion-derived) models of human relationships with nonhumans are also no good for ecological solidarity. Ecological stewardship is ostensibly opposed to anthropocentric tyranny; but both are artifacts of the Severing. Stewardship is the “lite” or less directly coercive (more hegemonic or panoptical) version. One should be the lord over nonhumans, not their tyrant; feudal rather than Assyrian. The capitalist upgrade of this concept is being efficient, minimizing one’s impact on Earth; the language that 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 for Marx, the Strong and Weak MATT brothers have a pair of cousins, 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 micromanagement of the precise minimum space required to live and breathe, from which Marx generalizes:

[Capital] 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.

The cinema is surely a contemporary version of Plato’s cave. The implicit warm, dark, tactile intimacy of such a cave is overlooked if all we want to do is preserve the quality of the shadow play on the walls. And we seem very certain about that shadow play. It has precisely lost a whole dimension of its playful quality, becoming in-flight entertainment, a high-fidelity screen with no flickering, on which we see what we know and know what we see. We don’t even have fellow feeling for the puppeteers or the puppets gyrating behind us as we watch, or for the flames that they are tending or the wood the flames require. This is not being trapped in an illusion. It’s being trapped in an oppressive and boring reality that leaves no space open for illusion and play. The only goal is to maintain existence. It sounds both cruel and tedious.

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 own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce one-sidedly, while man produces universally; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need …

It is therefore in 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?