Humankind. Timothy Morton

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