Author: David R Cole

Dawn of the Symbiocene, Photo: Cathy Fitzgerald, 2019

Foreword:

In 2013, after giving up her professorship to rally the world about the moral imperative to save life on Earth, environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore asked

“If you house is on fire what should you do? […] Of course, you put out the fire – there are children in that house, there are billions of children in that house…”[1]

In 2019, Greta Thunberg embodies Kathleen’s concerns:

“I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”[2]

Dara and his mother in Hollywood Forest (2016) Photo: Cathy Fitzgerald

This article is for a young boy I know who is called Dara. His name is the Irish word for Ireland’s great Oak tree, trees that signalled Ireland’s once rich ecological past and former beautiful lands. Dara has long loved my Hollywood Forest Story work[3]. He says ‘It’s epic!’ and loved our late dog Holly dearly, who was the namesake and co-founder of my forest-art work. I heard recently his biggest wish is that his grandfather, a farmer, might give him 2 acres to plant as a permanent forest with many, many Oak trees.

The planetary emergency we are facing is a crisis of Western civilization

The planetary emergency is specifically a crisis of dominant Western civilization that has over millennia viewed itself separate from and superior to the natural world.[4] In Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests (2004), US writer Derrick Jensen recounts that the earliest written records of Western civilization tell of King Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia felling great cedar forests for glory and power.[5]

Today human activities affect planetary processes.[6] Geologists describe this unprecedented epoch where one species is affecting the viability of life on Earth as the Anthropocene – the age of man.  While some geologists debate that the Anthropocene age begins with the Great Acceleration of industrialization after World War II, the story of Gilgamesh reveals Western civilization’s pattern of ecocide probably arose thousands of years ago.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

In 2012, climate scientists were trying valiantly to convey the planetary crisis and some began to use the Anthropocene to frame the planetary emergency. Some commissioned audio-visual communicators and one video produced and shown at the 2012 Planet under Pressure summit[7] went viral – it was called ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’. Given this global platform, the idea of the Anthropocene entered the humanities and some contemporary art discourse.

In the short ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ video[8] I initially admired the Earthrise-type imagery. The animations graphically depicted the effects of man on Earth thousands of years ago. And, it collated masses of recent scientific data to visualise ‘the great acceleration’ of destruction occurring by man’s activities in recent decades.[9] But instead of declaring alarm, a narrator comfortingly conveyed admiration for our Anthropocene and suggested that we had the ability, the science, the technology to overcome difficulties. I wrote an essay soon after as I felt that this Anthropocene story was problematic.[10]

The Age of the Sociopath

For the developing story of the Anthropocene, I more identify with Jensen’s arguments against it.[11] Jensen argues this Anthropocene story is ‘grossly misleading and narcissistic’. He argues that ‘[m]ankind aren’t the ones “transforming” – read, killing – the planet. Civilized humans are!’  He identifies that the Anthropocene story all too easily obscures the fact that indigenous people, as in his area, existed for thousands of years without destroying their environments.

Jensen argues the Age of the Anthropocene has been an era of gross ecocide and violence against more Earth-aligned cultures and that it should instead be called ‘The Age of the Sociopath’.[12]  The US sociologist Charles Derber’s extensive thesis confirms modern industrial civilization is a sociopathic society[13] and the late Native American writer Jack D Forbes’ insists that Columbus’ conquest of North America is a form of cannibalism against life, ‘wetiko’ in his language, that extends to modern times.[14] More recently, I feel the story of the Anthropocene exemplifies a globalising identity of white privilege that overlooks the other.

The Capitalocene, or the Plantationocene, or the Chthulucene

Others have offered alternatives to the Anthropocene, Jason Moore offers the Capitalocene which identifies unrestrained capital accumulation as the main culprit of the recent Great Acceleration.[15] Donna Harraway argues the Capitalocene is useful, and she also introduces the related term Plantationocene.[16] Coined in 2014, the Plantationocene resonates strongly with my focus that significant harm to the Earth has been inflicted by industrial culture’s anti-ecological monoculture plantation practices. Naming any violence, like domestic violence or ecocide, is an important first step to overcome cultures of harm.[17]

But when we know our Earth is on fire and that monoculture madness is causing Earth’s life support systems to collapse, ideas to help us move away from our erroneous ecocidal world-view are urgently needed. When today’s climate scientists are pronouncing an endgame in a decade unless we radically change our ways, Harraway’s next move to depart from pinpointing the causes of the Anthropocene, to formulate the Chthulucene, her concept of a living, thriving interconnected Earth composed of man and other species, is relevant. She argues this more encompassing term might more fully acknowledge humanity’s ecological past and envision its slim possibility of restorative relations with the Earth and its inhabitants.

The Symbiocene

However, in 2016, I was immediately impressed with an essay entitled ‘Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene’[18] from Australian Philosopher and former Professor of Sustainability, Glenn Albrecht. Albrecht’s Symbiocene follows his significant work to develop new words and concepts, like solastalgia,[19] now used internationally by eco-psychologists and legal experts to identify and argue the validity of severe emotional distress and mental health conditions experienced by people living next to destroyed environments.

The Symbiocene is where humanity has to go if it wishes to survive. Albrecht’s term Symbiocene offers a similar vision to Harraway’s Chthulucene as they both refer to revelations of new symbiotic science. Albrecht offers an extensive philosophical and psycho-social framework and new terminology for the Symbiocene age in his book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World.[20]

Symbiotic science helps envision an ecological era

Having previously worked in science research, and with my interest in ecological forestry, I had been following the new science of symbiosis. As I already viewed my eco-social art practice in advocating ecological forestry, as fundamentally restoring symbiotic biodiversity, I recognised the importance of Albrecht’s work for the planetary emergency.

Albrecht’s Symbiocene directly connects with symbiotic science that confirms that life survives and thrives through interrelated mutuality between many species. As Albrecht writes, ‘symbiosis has now emerged as a primary determinant of the conditions of life’(Ibid.) Supporting this argument, Professor of Forest Ecology, Suzanne Simard has particularly popularised advances in symbiotic science through her public TED talks on ‘Mother Trees’[21] and forests. Her and others’ research confirms different tree species in forests signal and send nutrients via vast networks of fungi – the wood-wide web. Importantly her symbiotic studies reveal that forests, the most complex and adaptable systems ever to evolve, do well because ‘forests are super-cooperators’.[22] Simard’s and others’ symbiotic science is revolutionising the still dominant story of evolution as competition toward a radical understanding that life exists from a cooperation between all species.

Simard also recognises, like Jensen, that indigenous people’s cultural activities helped ensure their forests flourished. Correspondingly, as most of the Earth’s biodiversity remains in areas where indigenous people live, there is much to learn from other nonWestern cultures. Albrecht also makes an important observation for young women when he highlights the considerable pushback against Simard’s peer-reviewed forest science and other early champions of ecological and symbiotic thinking who were female is evidence of the ‘threat to the patriarchy, reductionism, and mechanism that have long ruled in academia, science, commerce, and industry’.[23]

Evolution as competition, expressed in Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’, emboldened The Enlightenment Age to view mankind as independent from and superior to the rest of life. With Christian religion more concerned with the hereafter, modern Western society was given permission to view other life on Earth as a resource for progress. Albrecht reflects the other deadly delusions promoted by the Enlightenment; individualism, dualism and human exceptionalism underline today’s prevalent and now globalized anti-ecological worldview, adding today’s neoliberal ideology hasn’t helped.[24]

‘New Words for a New World’ – ‘Soliphilia’

Albrecht’s new book is important and I can only touch on some of his key Psychoterratic concepts and terms that he uses to construct a vision of the Symbiocene. Importantly, he visualises the Earth’s next-generation, Generation S (shortened as ‘Gen S’) having an increased awareness of how life is dependent on symbiotic wellbeing. He believes that this will foster specific emotional states to protect life locally. This promotes what he calls ‘soliphilia’, a deep love of place that inspires communities toward a newfound ecological yet secular spirituality, and critically, toward embracing life-sustaining politics.

Soliphilia expands my perception to understand the agency, the social power to protect ecosystems, that regularly arises from situated eco-social art practices (my term for ecological art practice[25]). My ongoing eco-social art practice in which I have explored ecological forestry to transform the monoculture plantation I live in, fosters strong soliphilia[26] in me. As this small 2.5 acre forest, that we call Hollywood, provides me with air, occasional fuel to keep me warm, much solace and birdsong, it only took a few years after I began my practice to notice a keen sense to protect this forest’s thriving permanently.

After consulting a lawyer colleague, I knew I could not legally prevent Hollywood being clear-felled once I wasn’t on the land. But with dialogue with leading Irish foresters who were beginning to explore European continuous cover forestry and with my connections to the Irish Green Party, I found my self advancing national ecological forest policy[27] and then successfully lobbying support for the late Polly Higgins’ ecocide law[28].

Hollywood, ‘the little wood that could’ is a small 2-acre Close-to-Nature continuous cover forest growing under the Blackstairs Mountains, in South County Carlow, Ireland. Photo: Martin Lyttle

In this way, I was surprised but proud of how my practice had enabled Hollywood forest to become the story of ‘the little wood that could’.

‘Sumbioregionalism’ – fostered through eco-social art practices

My creative practice is very modest in scale. I am observing with interest, others’ like Northern Ireland artist-researcher Dr Anita McKeown’s more extensive situated eco-social art practice that is unfolding over several years with the support of the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. In her co-designed, resilience project, ‘Co-Des-Res’, she has established a multidisciplinary ecology and art team that is building localised ecoliteracy for and with the community who live in the Iveragh Peninsula, Co. Kerry (see the newsletters on this site to gain an overview of all the community engagement).[29] At the moment, McKeown is framing the work through extensive knowledge of creative permaculture and place-making and employing the colourful, and increasingly understood symbols of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, I can see such work is contributing to what Albrecht sees as an inevitable ‘sumbioregionalism’ and that this is a contribution to the Symbiocene.[30]

Albrecht defines a ‘sumbioregion’ as an ‘identifiable biophysical and cultural geographical space where humans live together and engage in a common pursuit of the reestablishment and creation of new symbiotic interrelationships between humans, nonhuman organisms, and landscapes’.[31] The cultural and environmental programmes of the West of Ireland’s Burrenbeo Trust is another great example.[32]

Importantly, as a past Professor of Sustainability, Albrecht is well versed to understand that the UN’s sustainable development concept has failed to halt ecosystem collapse. In his new work he shares that in the development of a jurisprudence system for Earth Justice, the United Nations has endorsed his Symbiocene framework when it confirmed that ‘current approaches to the Anthropocene epoch needs to be expanded.’ He quotes the  UN (2016) which states:

concepts such as the Symbiocene, an era when human action, culture and enterprise would nurture the mutual interdependence of the greater community and promote the health of all ecosystems, are more promising and solution-oriented.’[33]

However, perhaps we might ask is the Symbiocene is an overly optimistic framework? Yet Albrecht doesn’t shy away from troubling transitional and possibly violent periods ahead. These realities are unfolding as UK Professor Jem Bendell’s (2018) paper on confirmed nonlinear climate breakdown and how to navigate the ensuing societal collapse affirms. Bendell’s paper, downloaded over 300,000 times in recent months, calls for truth, emotional support, activism and much work for what he is framing as a necessary deep adaptation to collapse.[34] Here I argue that Albrecht’s detailed preview of the emotional, moral, generational, cultural, spiritual, technological and political aspects of the Symbiocene, covers how we might deeply envision and honourably adapt to an uncertain future. As the Earth’s children are rising, a clear detailed framework on how to achieve a better, more beautiful world with other extraordinary lifeforms is surely of immense value.

In 2014, the late Dr Chris Seeley, an artist, action researcher and sustainability educator nominated me to attend a global New Story Summit at Findhorn, Scotland. Over 300 attendees: young people, indigenous people, scientists, environmental lawyers, game developers, storytellers, educators, group workers and a few eco-artists came together for a week in Findhorn’s Universal Hall. The theme of the Summit took inspiration from the great geo-theologian Thomas Berry’s seminal essay ‘The New Story’ in which he emphasised that the World desperately needs a new story that conveys an ecological worldview.[35] To me, the Symbiocene is the New Story.

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Cathy Fitzgerald, PhD, is a New Zealander, eco-social artist, researcher and educator now living in Ireland. She completed her PhD by Practice The Ecological Turn: Living Well with Forests to articulate eco-social art practice using Guattari’s ecosophy and action research, in 2018, at the National College of Art and Design in Ireland. She continues her ongoing Hollywood Forest Story adventures with new rescue dog Willow. She is currently sharing her ecoliteracy learning to other creative workers through online courses at www.haumea.ie

Acknowledgements:

This paper was supported by Dr. Nessa Cronin, Irish Studies, National University of Galway and Professors Karen Till and Gerry Kearns, Maynooth University, Ireland for the Art & Geography: Art, Activism and Social Engagement in the Age of the Capitalocene panel at the 7th EUGeo Congress in Galway, Ireland, 16 May, 2019. I also wish to acknowledge Dr Frances Fahy and Dr. Kathy Reilly (EUGEO Conference Co-Chairs and organisers) for the bursary that enabled me to attend the Congress. This paper was also presented at the Trinity College Dublin ‘Art in the Anthropocene‘ 3-day International Conference’, on 7th June,2019, through the invitation of  Professor Steve Wilmer and Dr. Yvonne Scott.

This article is re-published in the book “Plasticity for the Planet: On Environmental Challenge for Arts and its Institutions” by editor Magdalena Ziolkowska,Centre for Contemporary Art U-jazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Milan: Mousse Publishing. This book accompanies the international exhibition Human-Free Earth (2019) curated by Jaroslaw Lubiak.

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References

1. Dean Moore, ‘If Your House is on Fire’, 23 September 2013, https://youtu.be/6IRbqKYOcrY
2. G. Thunberg, ‘“Our House is on Fire:”: Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate’, The Guardian, 25 January, 2019.
3. https://hollywoodforest.com/
4.  D. Jensen  The Myth of Human Supremacy. New York: Seven Stories Press, (2016).
5. Jensen &  G. Draffan, Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests. New York: Green Books, Totnes, UK. (2004)
6. IPCC , Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. [V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H. O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J. B. R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, T. Waterfield (eds.)]. 2018.
7. http://www.igbp.net/events/event/planetunderpressurenewknowledgetowardssolutions.5.1b8ae20512db692f2a6800015489.html
8. https://youtu.be/fvgG-pxlobk
9. Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, Cornelia Ludwig ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, Volume: 2 issue: 1, 2015: 81-98.
10. See: C. Fitzgerald, The Anthropocene: 10 000 years of ecocide, https://hollywoodforest.com/2012/05/12/the-anthropocene-10-000-years-of-ecocide/
11.  D. Jensen, ‘Age of the Sociopath’. Spring. Earth Island Institute, 2013, http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/age_of_the_sociopath/
12.  Ibid.
13.  C. Derber, Sociopathic Society: A People’s Sociology of the United States. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2013.
14. J.D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Seven Stories Press; 1978, revised edition, November 4, 2008. See also http://artforclimatechange.org/geo-engineering-is-wetikoism-at-its-worst/?fbclid=IwAR3fuDc6XllWxuOoCXYO_7a2vjOS2dDlQuKB3X3nDIa9jGGaN-0ypgvI-GM
15. J. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.
16. D. Harraway,  ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’. Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6, 2015: 159-165.
17. C. Fitzgerald, The Hollywood Forest Story: Living Well with a Forest to Explain Eco-Social Art Practice, free-to-download audio-visual eBook, Apple iBook Store, 2018: 77, https://books.apple.com/ie/book/the-hollywood-forest-story/id1441958722
18. Glenn Albrecht, ‘Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene’, https://www.humansandnature.org/exiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene
19. Glenn Albrecht, ‘The Age of Solastalgia’, http://theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337
20. Glenn Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Cornell University Press, 2019. Kindle edition.
21. Cathy Fitzgerald, ‘Mother Trees – the Earth’s network for Resilience’, https://hollywoodforest.com/2013/03/10/mother-trees-the-earthss-networks-for-resilience/
22. Suzanne Simard, How trees talk to each other, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs&feature=youtu.be
23. See 20.
24. Ibid.
25. https://hollywoodforest.com/portfolio/what-is-eco-social-art-practice/
26. Glenn Albrecht, ‘Solastalgia, Soliphilia, Eutierria and Art’, https://glennaalbrecht.com/2016/06/27/solastalgia-soliphilia-eutierria-and-art/
27. C. Fitzgerald, ‘Continuous Cover Forests Key in [Irish] Green Party’s New Forest Policy’, 2013, https://www.greenparty.ie/continuous-cover-forests-key-in-green-party/
28. C. Fitzgerald, [Irish] ‘Greens unanimously adopt motion to end ecocide; a new legal framework to prevent fracking and other pollution’, 2013, ‘https://www.greenparty.ie/greens-unanimously-adopt-motion-to-end-ecocide-a-new-legal-framework-to-prevent-fracking-and-other-pollution/ See also http://www.stopecocide.earth
29. http://www.codesres.ie
30. G, Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Cornell University Press, 2019. Kindle edition.
31. Ibid.
32. https://burrenbeo.com/
33. See 30.
34. J, Bendell, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. IFLAS Occasional Paper 2. 2018. https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
35. T, Berry ‘The New Story’, Teilhard Studies, 1978, no. 1 (winter). [A video excerpt of Thomas Berry discussing his 1978 Teilhard Studies monograph entitled “The New Story” at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia in 1984. This is one in a series of Thomas Berry videos which were recorded by Lou Niznik and re-mastered by Wes Pascoe. Lou’s video library was donated by Jane Blewett to the Thomas Berry Foundation in 2012. The re-mastered video series was produced by Don Smith of Calgary, Alberta with executive supervision by Mary Evelyn Tucker. https://youtu.be/rS5byHRScVY

Galway, Ireland

First published here on the Public Seminar web site: January 10, 2020

Thomas Nail

Associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver

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Thirty years ago there were fifteen border walls around the world. Now there are seventy walls and over one billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone may even double in the next forty years due to global warming. It is not surprising that over the past two decades, we have also seen the rise of an increasingly powerful global climate-security market designed to profit from (and help sustain) these crises. The construction of walls and fences to block rising sea levels and incoming people has become one of the world’s fastest growing industries, alongside the detention and deportation of migrants, and is projected to reach $742 billion by 2023. I believe we are witnessing the emergence of what we might call a “climate-migration-industrial complex.”

This complex is composed of private companies who profit by securitizing nation-states from the effects of climate-related events, including migration. This includes private detention centers, border construction companies, surveillance technology consultants and developers, deportation and transportation contractors, and a growing army of other subcontractors profiting from insecurity more broadly. Every feature of this crisis complex is an opportunity for profit. For example, even when security measures “fail” and migrants cross borders illegally, or remain beyond their visas to live without status as “criminals,” there is an entire wing of private companies paid to hunt them down, detain them, and deport them just across the border, where they can return and begin the market cycle all over again. Each step in the “crimmigration” process now has its own cottage industry and dedicated army of lobbyists to perpetuate the laws that support it.

Here is the incredible double paradox that forms the backbone of the climate-migration-industrial complex: right-wing nationalists and their politicians claim they want to deport all undocumented migrants, but if they did, they would destroy their own economy. Capitalists, on the other hand, want to grow the economy with migrant labor (any honest economist will tell you that immigration almost always leads to growth in GDP), but if that labor is too expensive, then it’s not nearly as profitable.

Trump is the Janus-faced embodiment of this anti-immigrant, pro-economy dilemma and the solution to it — not that he necessarily knows it. With one hand, migrant labor is strategically criminalized and devalorized by a xenophobic state, and with the other, it is securitized and hyper-exploited by the economy. It is a win-win situation for right-wing capitalists but a crucial element is still missing: what will continue to compel migrants to leave their homes and work as exploited criminals in an increasingly xenophobic country?

This is where the figure of the climate migrant comes in. What we call “climate migrants” or “climate refugees” are not the victims of merely “natural disasters,” because climate change is not a strictly natural process — it is also highly political. The causes of climate-related migration are disproportionately produced by rich Western countries and the effects are disproportionately suffered by poorer countries. The circumstances that determine who is forced to migrate are also influenced by the history of colonialism, global inequality, and the same conditions that have propelled economic migration for decades. In short, the fact that climate change benefits the perpetrators of climate destruction by producing an increasing supply of desperate, criminalized, physically and economically displaced laborers is no coincidence. In fact, it is the key to the Trump “solution.”

Another key is the use of climate change to acquire new land. When people are forced to migrate out of a territory, or when frozen territories thaw, new lands, waters, and forests become open to extractive industries like mining, drilling, fishing, and logging. Trump’s recent (and ridiculous) bid to buy the thawing territory of Greenland for its oil and gas reserves is one example of this. Climate-stricken urban areas open up new real estate markets, as the gentrification of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina illustrated. In other words, climate change might not mean the end of capitalism, but rather could actually signal its resurgence from current falling rates of ecological profit. During colonialism, everything and everyone that could be easily appropriated (oil, slaves, old-growth forests, etc.), was gobbled up. The workers who are left today under post-colonialism demand more money and more rights. The minerals left are more expensive to extract. This is why capitalists have increasingly retreated to financial speculation, and now to monetizing their own crises.

If only there were new ways, the capitalist dreams, to kick start the economy and cheaply dislodge huge numbers of people from their land, devalorize their labor, and then appropriate that labor extremely cheaply. In other words, if climate change did not exist, capitalism would have to create it. Luckily for the capitalists, it does exist, because they did create it. Climate migrants now form what we might call a “disposable climate labor army,” conscripted out of a standing reserve of global poverty from wherever the next climate-related disaster strikes, and deployed wherever capitalism demands precarious, securitized, and criminalized labor to be exploited.

We need to rethink the whole framing of the climate migration “crisis.” Among other things, we need a more movement-oriented political theory to grapple better with the highly mobile events of our time — what I call a “kinopolitics.” The advent of the Capitalocene/Kinocene makes possible today the insight that nature, humans, and society have always been in motion. Humans are and have always been fundamentally migratory, just as the climate and the earth are. These twin insights might sound obvious today, but if taken seriously, they offer a complete inversion of the dominant interpretive paradigms of the climate and migration crises.

Humans and Earth have always been in motion, but not all patterns of motion are the same. There is no natural, normal, or default state of the earth or of human society. Therefore, we have to study the patterns of circulation that make possible these metastable states and not take them as given. This is what I have tried to work out in The Figure of the Migrant (2015) and Theory of the Border (2016). Unfortunately, the dominant framework for thinking about the climate and migrant crises is currently upside down. It starts from the perspective of a triple stasis: 1) that the earth and human society are in some sense separable and static, or at least stable, structures; 2) that the future should continue to be stable as well; and 3) that if there is not stability, then there is a “crisis.” Mobility, then, is a crisis only if we assume that there was or should be stasis in the first place. For example, migrants are said to destabilize society, and climate change is said to destabilize the earth.

From a kinopolitical perspective, we can see that the opposite is, in fact, true: Humans were first migratory, and only later settled into more metastable patterns of social-circulation (made historically possible by the social expulsion and dispossession of others). Migrants are not outside society but have played a productive and reproductive role throughout history. Migrant movements are constitutive and even transformative elements of society, rather than exceptional or marginal phenomena. The real question is how we ever came to act and think as if societies were not processes of social circulation that relied on migration as their conditions of reproduction. The earth, too, was first migratory, and only later did it settle into metastable patterns of geological and atmospheric circulation (e.g. the Holocene). Why did we ever think of the earth as a stable surface, immune from human activity in the first place?

The problem with the prevailing interpretation of climate change and migration is that the flawed paradigm that has defined the “crisis,” the notion of stasis, is also proposed as the solution “Let’s just get things back to normal stability again.” In short, I think a new paradigm is needed that does not use the same tools that generated the “crisis” to solve it — i.e. capitalism, colonialism, and the nation-state.

Today’s migrant “crisis” is a product of the paradox at the heart of the capitalist, territorial nation-state form, just as the climate crisis is an expression of the paradox at the heart of anthropocentrism. The solutions, therefore, will not come from the forms in crisis but only from the birth of new forms-in-motion that begin with the theoretical primacy of the very characteristic that is dissolving the old forms: the inherent mobility of the migrant climate and the climate migrant.

Thomas Nail is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, working on a series of books on the philosophy of movement. His most recent book is Theory of the Image (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Keywords: Capitalism, Climate, Climate Crisis, Economics, Forced migration, Migration, Politics

George Monbiot

New research suggests there was no state of grace: for two million years humankind has been the natural world’s nemesis.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 25th March 2014

You want to know who we are? Really? You think you do, but you will regret it. This article, if you have any love for the world, will inject you with a venom – a soul-scraping sadness – without an obvious antidote.

The Anthropocene, now a popular term among scientists, is the epoch in which we live: one dominated by human impacts on the living world. Most date it from the beginning of the industrial revolution. But it might have begun much earlier, with a killing spree that commenced two million years ago. What rose onto its hindlegs on the African savannahs was, from the outset, death: the destroyer of worlds.

Before Homo erectus, perhaps our first recognisably-human ancestor, emerged in Africa, the continent abounded with monsters. There were several species of elephants. There were sabretooths and false sabretooths, giant hyaenas and creatures like those released in The Hunger Games: amphicyonids, or bear dogs, vast predators with an enormous bite.

Amphicyonid (“bear dog”) skeleton

Professor Blaire van Valkenburgh has developed a means by which we could roughly determine how many of these animals there were(1). When there are few predators and plenty of prey, the predators eat only the best parts of the carcass. When competition is intense, they eat everything, including the bones. The more bones a carnivore eats, the more likely its teeth are to be worn or broken. The breakages in carnivores’ teeth were massively greater in the pre-human era(2).

Blaire van Valkenburgh’s tooth breakage graph

Not only were there more species of predators, including species much larger than any found on earth today, but they appear to have been much more abundant – and desperate. We evolved in a terrible, wonderful world – that was no match for us.

Homo erectus possessed several traits that appear to have made it invincible: intelligence, cooperation; an ability to switch to almost any food when times were tough; and a throwing arm that allowed it to do something no other species has ever managed – to fight from a distance. (The increasing distance from which we fight is both a benchmark and a determinant of human history). It could have driven giant predators off their prey and harried monstrous herbivores to exhaustion and death.

As the paleontologists Lars Werdelin and Margaret Lewis show, the disappearance of much of the African megafauna appears to have coincided with the switch towards meat eating by human ancestors(3). The great extent and strange pattern of extinction (concentrated among huge, specialist animals at the top of the food chain) is not easy to explain by other means.

At the Oxford megafauna conference last week, I listened as many of the world’s leading scientists in this field mapped out a new understanding of the human impact on the planet(4). Almost everywhere we went, humankind erased a world of wonders, changing the way the biosphere functions. For example, modern humans arrived in Europe and Australia at about the same time – between 40 and 50,000 years ago – with similar consequences. In Europe, where animals had learnt to fear previous versions of the bipedal ape, the extinctions happened slowly. Within some 10 or 15,000 years, the continent had lost its straight-tusked elephants, forest rhinos, hippos, hyaenas and monstrous scimitar cats.

Straight tusked elephants once dominated the British ecosystem

In Australia, where no hominim had set foot before modern humans arrived, the collapse was  almost instant. The rhinoceros-sized wombat(5), the ten-foot kangaroo, the marsupial lion, the monitor lizard larger than a Nile crocodile(6), the giant marsupial tapir, the horned tortoise as big as a car(7) – all went, in ecological terms, overnight.

Giant monitor lizard skeleton

A few months ago, a well-publicised paper claimed that the great beasts of the Americas – mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, lions and sabretooths, eight-foot beavers(8), a bird with a 26-foot wingspan(9) – could not have been exterminated by humans, because the fossil evidence for their extinction marginally pre-dates the evidence for human arrival(10).

I have never seen a paper demolished as elegantly and decisively as this was at last week’s conference. The archaeologist Todd Surovell demonstrated that the mismatch is just what you would expect if humans were responsible(11). Mass destruction is easy to detect in the fossil record: in one layer bones are everywhere, in the next they are nowhere. But people living at low densities with basic technologies leave almost no traces. With the human growth rates and kill rates you’d expect in the first pulse of settlement (about 14,000 years ago), the great beasts would have lasted only 1,000 years. His work suggests that the most reliable indicator of human arrival in the fossil record is a wave of large mammal extinctions.

These species were not just ornaments of the natural world. The new work presented at the conference suggests that they shaped the rest of the ecosystem. In Britain during the last interglacial period, elephants, rhinos and other great beasts maintained a mosaic of habitats: a mixture of closed canopy forest, open forest, glade and sward(12). In Australia, the sudden flush of vegetation that followed the loss of large herbivores caused stacks of leaf litter to build up, which became the rainforests’ pyre: fires (natural or manmade) soon transformed these lush places into dry forest and scrub(13).

In the Amazon and other regions, large herbivores moved nutrients from rich soils to poor ones, radically altering plant growth(14,15). One controversial paper suggests that the eradication of the monsters of the Americas caused such a sharp loss of atmospheric methane (generated in their guts) that it could have triggered the short ice age which began 12,800 years ago, called the Younger Dryas(16).

And still we have not stopped. Poaching has reduced the population of African forest elephants by 65% since 2002(17). The range of the Asian elephant – which once lived from Turkey to the coast of China – has contracted by 97%; the ranges of the Asian rhinos by over 99%(18). Elephants distribute the seeds of hundreds of rainforest tree species; without them these trees are functionally extinct(19,20).

Is this all we are? A diminutive monster that can leave no door closed, no hiding place intact, that is now doing to the great beasts of the sea what we did so long ago to the great beasts of the land? Or can we stop? Can we use our ingenuity, which for two million years has turned so inventively to destruction, to defy our evolutionary history?

http://www.monbiot.com

References:

1. eg Wendy J. Binder and Blaire Van Valkenburgh, 2010. A comparison of tooth wear and breakage in Rancho La Brea sabertooth cats and dire wolves across time. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724630903413016#.UzBUcM40uQk

2. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/valkenburgh.pdf

3. Lars Werdelin, 2013. King of Beasts. Scientific American. http://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2013/11-01/

4. http://oxfordmegafauna.weebly.com/

5. Diprotodon.

6. Megalania.

7. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/last-giant-land-turtle/

8. Castoroides ohioensis

9. The Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens).

10. Matthew T. Boulanger and R. Lee Lyman, 2014. Northeastern North American Pleistocene megafauna chronologically overlapped minimally with Paleoindians. Quaternary Science Reviews 85, pp35-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.11.024

11. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/surovell.pdf

12. Christopher J. Sandom et al, 2014. High herbivore density associated with vegetation diversity in interglacial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111, no. 11, pp4162–4167. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1311014111

13. Susan Rule et al, 23rd March 2012. The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia. Science Vol. 335, pp 1483-1486. doi: 10.1126/science.1214261. https://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6075/1483.full

14. Christopher E. Doughty, AdamWolf and Yadvinder Malhi, 11 August 2013. The legacy of the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions on nutrient availability in Amazonia. Nature Geoscience vol. 6, pp761–764. doi: 10.1038/ngeo1895. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n9/full/ngeo1895.html

15. Adam Wolf, Christopher E. Doughty, Yadvinder Malhi, Lateral Diffusion of Nutrients by Mammalian Herbivores in Terrestrial Ecosystems. PLOS One, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071352. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0071352

16. Felisa A. Smith, 2010. Methane emissions from extinct megafauna. Nature Geoscience 3, 374 – 375. doi:10.1038/ngeo877. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n6/full/ngeo877.html

17. Fiona Maisels, pers comm. This is an update of the figures published here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0059469

18. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/campos.pdf

19. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/campos.pdf

20. http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/megafauna/galetti.pdf

Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

The following text is a lightly edited excerpt from History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019)

Dystopian ecological and technological scenarios have become dominant visions of the future in post-Second World War Western societies. Whereas modern utopias called for longer-term gradual achievement, today’s dystopian prospects impose themselves on humanity in the shape of a sudden event.

I reckon that this statement might sound rather suspicious. For how could a future prospect impose itself on humanity? Would this entail the attribution of agency to something inanimate? Well, yes and no. It would certainly entail the attribution of agency to something non-human, but non-human does not really mean inanimate. Recent dystopian prospects revolve around the agency of nature or the agency of machines, both of them being non-human but animate. Besides, their attributed agency does not appear as independent of human agency. The central tenet of the postulated agency of nature and machines in ecological and technological prospects is actually that it arises out of human action and appears as initially human-induced. The keyword here is initially. Because, at the same time, the agency of both nature and machines is expected to increase and gain entirely new dimensions at the expense of human agency, the loss of which is precisely what constitutes the perceived threat.

To gain a better understanding of the situation, consider how, on the one hand, the prospect of global nuclear warfare, anthropogenic climate change and technological apocalypse appear as inherent threats which indeed are results of (inconsiderate) human activity and human agency. Nick Bostrom wonderfully captures the novelty of the challenge of facing threats brought about by human activity by making a distinction between ‘anthropogenic existential risks’ as opposed to ‘natural existential risks’ (2013: 15–16). Whereas humanity has faced various natural existential risks before (such as asteroid impacts), the threats to humankind increasingly appear as consequences of human activity, attesting to a sense of unprecedented human capacities.

The most momentous affirmation of such increased human powers has been made already in the 1950s by Julian Huxley, claiming in his essay on transhumanism that it appears ‘as if man had been suddenly appointed managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution’ ([1957] 1968: 73). At the same time, the more critical contemporary voice of Hannah Arendt, commenting on what is known today as the first events of the Space Race and on the same potential of science and technology to further increase human powers, painted a more balanced picture:

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. (1958: 2–3)

The prospect of human-induced climate catastrophe, although conceivable for decades and remarked on since the early postwar years, has entered a wider circulation of ideas somewhat later than Arendt and Huxley’s considerations. It has joined the threat posed by the increased human ‘ability to destroy all organic life on earth’ especially as following the quick spread of the notion of the Anthropocene to describe anthropogenic changes in the earth system and the emergence of earth system science. In the view of Clive Hamilton (2017), the latter is the proper context of the notion, representing a wholesale paradigm shift precisely because of new conceptualizations being inseparable from the birth of new sciences. Whether or not this is the case, the three prospects together – a climate apocalypse, a technoscientific catastrophe and a global nuclear warfare – appear today as the postwar triad of cataclysm.

The dystopian visions of climate change and technology revolve around the possibility of passing a point of no return. Once it is passed, the threat consists of nature taking over what has initially been human-induced and human-controlled change, or of a human-created ‘superintelligence’ – defined by Bostrom as ‘any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest’ (2014: 22) – surpassing human intelligence. Whatever may happen afterwards is no longer accessible for human reasoning, given that it no longer entails human mastery. This is precisely what makes such prospects unsettling at best or catastrophic at worst: the cognitive inaccessibility of the possible consequences of human agency in bringing about its own insignificance as measured against the capacities of its own creations. In the technological domain, the notion that captures such a vision of the future of passing a point of no return is technological singularity. Although ‘singularity’ has been used earlier in the context of technology, the term ‘technological singularity’ has been put into wider circulation by Vernor Vinge in the 1990s. It describes the potential eruption of a sudden, game-changer event in the shape of the creation of greater-than-human intelligence that presumably creates even greater and greater superhuman intelligence at an explosive pace. Or, in the words of Vinge, ‘from the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control’ (1993: 12).

To a certain extent, passing the point of no return in an event-like manner may be true of the prospect of a global nuclear warfare too. This was the initial threat that led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to set up the symbolic Doomsday Clock in 1947. As the ‘2018 Doomsday Clock Statement’ explains, the intention behind introducing the clock was ‘using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet’ (Mecklin 2018: 2). The statement sets the clock to two minutes to midnight, half a minute closer than it was set by the previous 2017 statement, and – reflecting recent global policy agendas – it marks the return of the centrality of the nuclear threat by nevertheless keeping its focus on the entire postwar triad of cataclysm.

Compared to the prospect of nuclear self-destruction, a climate and a technological catastrophe, although being conceivable earlier, are only more recently emerging as widely recognized dominant threats, recognized as anthropogenic existential risks. The theme of anthropogenic climate change and the notion of the Anthropocene – the proposed but not yet canonized geological epoch of humans becoming agents that shape the earth system – even conquered the agenda of historians. Following the pioneering adventures of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) into mapping the consequences of the notion of the Anthropocene for the discipline and the concept of history, historians – in line with practically any other domain of academic knowledge-production within the humanities and social sciences – have begun to explore the impact and use of the notion in historical scholarship (for instance, Robin 2013; Thomas 2014; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; Mikhail 2016).

However, whereas Chakrabarty’s initial point of departure was an extinction scenario that challenges the deep continuity of the modern processual notion of history and thus is ‘deeply destructive of our general sense of history’ (2009: 198), historians in particular and humanities and social sciences research in general typically seem more interested in maintaining business as usual. Instead of asking the question of how the current humanities knowledge regime may be challenged together with its established categories of critical scholarship by novel conceptualizations, they apply their long-existing categories to the new that is supposed to challenge them (until it no longer looks challenging). Where Chakrabarty (2015) sees an emerging zoecentric worldview focusing on life and featuring the anthropos as a species understanding of the human being, critical humanities only see ‘the ongoing fraud that calls itself “Anthropos”’ (Cohen and Colebrook 2017: 134), a deception of a universal humanity brought together under a threat in the name of survival. Historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz go even further by claiming that an undifferentiated notion of the anthropos is put out by geologists, earth system and climate scientists to pave their own way to achieve a ‘command post of a disheveled planet and its errant humanity. A geo-government of scientists!’ (2016: 80).

The debate between a new understanding of the human predicament as emerging in a scientific discourse and the categories of critical humanities scholarship will most likely continue. It is not my intention even to attempt to resolve it. What I would like to point out is only that my focus nevertheless lies with what I think is the more interesting and challenging question in Chakrabarty’s initial engagement: the one that senses a potential transformation of the way in which we conceive of ourselves and the world historically, instead of the one that habitually domesticates a new idea by applying the already existing conceptual tools of humanities criticism. Although the latter is equally legitimate and important, in times of unprecedented change the question is not that of how to accommodate that which is perceived as genuine novelty into our familiar ways of thinking. Rather, the question is how to recognize its novelty by creating a fresh set of concepts within the humanities and the social sciences (potentially in cooperation with the natural sciences).

The same goes for technological visions, which have not had a similar impact yet in the discipline of history. The growing societal engagement in debating visions of the future typically boils down in historical studies to histories that explore how the future was conceived of in the past. Although investigating past visions of the future has become a rather lively historical research topic recently (see especially the work of Jenny Andersson 2018; and Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė 2015), the historical profession is still largely missing out the otherwise widespread debate on the broader technological vision of the future today: on artificial intelligence, transhumanism, bioengineering, nanotechnology, human enhancement or genome editing (with the latter being a positive exception thanks to the recently initiated Double Helix History project at The University of Manchester). The two kinds of engagement could not be farther from each other. On the one hand, looking for traces and precedents of our current societal investment by mapping past expectations of the future is the standard historical operation. On the other, just as in the case of the Anthropocene debate, taking part in the wider discussion on recent future prospects that spark such ‘historical’ interest may challenge the very historical operation historians put to work when they align with societal interests and begin to study past visions of the future.

That today’s technological-scientific prospects matter immensely for the way we conceive of ourselves and the world historically is best attested to by the fact that this is practically the only thing that made Francis Fukuyama reconsider his ‘end of history’ thesis. Although scholars in the humanities and social sciences seem to have irrevocably linked him to the idea of ‘the end of history’, Fukuyama has already moved on. In a book on the prospect of biotechnology, published only a decade after The End of History, Fukuyama reflected on his previous theory as follows:

As the more perceptive critics of the concept of the ‘end of history’ have pointed out, there can be no end of history without an end of modern natural science and technology. Not only are we not at an end of science and technology; we appear to be poised at the cusp of one of the most momentous periods of technological advance in history. Biotechnology and a greater scientific understanding of the human brain promise to have extremely significant political ramifications. (2002: 15)

In these sentences, Fukuyama vests technology with the potential of carrying the historical process as we know it further, meaning that history as the course of affairs just goes on as fuelled by technologies that engineer even the human being. Such an understanding of today’s technology is nevertheless obviously limited inasmuch as it remains within the confines of the modern historical sensibility and within the confines of a political framework in which technology is subordinated to politics. At a later stage I will return to the question of the relationship between the political domain and technology both in the modern and in the postwar historical sensibilities. For the current line of argument, the more important point is that Fukuyama, even if in a misguided way as seen from the viewpoint of this book, at least recognizes the link between a sense of historicity and visions of the future.

Despite the elevated tone of the above quote, Fukuyama is aware that technology’s potential to appear as a vehicle of improvement is only one side of the coin. The other side is the prospect of doom, as ‘the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move it into a “posthuman” stage of history’ (Fukuyama 2002: 7). The inherent ambivalence of the technological prospect of the posthuman is a fairly common observation, having already been present in Arendt’s view. Today, it is a concern not only for Fukuyama and other bioconservatives in debates about the general prospect of a posthuman future to be brought about by technology, but also for advocates of radical enhancement. What they disagree about most deeply is what exactly they consider as ‘promise’ and ‘threat’. Whereas escaping the confines of (a statistically defined) human nature is a threat to Fukuyama (129–47), the very same prospect constitutes a promise for Bostrom (2003), the most prominent transhumanist philosopher today. And if this comes out as a promise for transhumanism, then the threat must be found elsewhere. For Bostrom, it takes the shape of an extinction event, regardless of whether the life threatened by extinction is human or posthuman. Hence the definition of existential risk – as ‘one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development’ (Bostrom 2013: 15) – can refer to a category even broader than humanity.

The simultaneity of the positive promise and the existential threat appears to build upon conflicting sets of ideas. Whereas the promise invokes a modern utopian structure of delivering a better future to be realized, the latter warns about the necessity to avoid the inherent perils of venturing into something unknown. Whereas the former claims a familiar historical trajectory of the betterment of human capacities, the latter claims to transcend those capacities that appear only as obstacles and unnecessary limitations. Although sometimes even transhumanists themselves mix up their own conceptual stakes by claiming continuity with Enlightenment ideals of human perfectibility, their promise is not about making already assumed human potentials better but about creating that which is better than human (Simon 2019). Nevertheless, the transhumanist project of enhancing humans by technological means is upheld as a promise as frequently as it is considered to be a threat, or is just debated in both terms without either explicitly advocating or opposing the transhumanist project itself (for example, Agar 2010; Fuller and Lipinska 2014; Sharon 2014; Hurlbut and Tirosh-Samuelson 2016).

All this clearly testifies that although it is possible to talk about the growing prominence, pertinence and dominance of postwar dystopian thought, it would be misleading to suggest that the Western world completely lacks or is heading toward the total absence of utopian thought. In fact, the postwar dominance of the dystopian is the most apparent precisely in the structural feature that even the remnants of modern utopian thought appear now as inherently dystopian, due to the sense of having something ahead that has no precedent. It is the either deliberate or unintentional bringing about the unprecedented – the unknown, the impenetrable by human reasoning – that constitutes the inherent risk of losing or simply not having human control over whatever is brought about.

References

Agar, Nicholas (2010), Humanity’s End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Andersson, Jenny (2018), The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Andersson, Jenny andEglė Rindzevičiūtė, eds. (2015), The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics,LondonandNew York: Routledge.

Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bonneuil, Christophe and Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste (2016), The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach, London: Verso.

Bostrom, Nick (2003), The Transhumanist FAQ: A General Introduction, World Transhumanist Association. Available at: http://www.nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf

Bostrom, Nick (2013), “Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority,” Global Policy, 4 (1): 15–31.

Bostrom, Nick (2014), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2009) “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (2): 197–222.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2015), The Human Condition in the Anthropocene. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values. Delivered at Yale University, 18–19 February, Available at: https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Chakrabarty%20manuscript.pdf

Cohen, Tom and Colebrook, Claire (2017), “Vortices: On ‘Critical Climate Change’ as a Project,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 116 (1): 129–143.

Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and the Last Man,New York: The Free Press.

Fuller, Steve and Veronika Lipinska (2014), The Proactinonary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Hamilton, Clive (2017), Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene, London: Polity.

Hurlbut, J. Benjamin and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, eds. (2016) Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, Wiesbaden: Springer.

Huxley, Julian ([1957] 1968), “Transhumanism,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 8 (1): 73–76.

Mecklin, John, ed. (2018), It Is Two Minutes to Midnight: 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Science and Security Board. Available at: https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%20Clock%20Statement.pdf

Robin, Libby (2013), “Histories for Changing Times: Entering the Anthropocene?” Australian Historical Studies, 44 (3): 329–40.

Sharon, Tamar (2014), Human Nature in an Age of Biotechnology: The Case for Mediated Posthumanism, Dordrecht: Springer.

Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár (2019) “The Story of Humanity and the Challenge of Posthumanity,” History of the Human Sciences, 32(2): 101–120.

Thomas, Julia Adeney (2014), “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review, 119 (5): 1587–1607.

Vinge, Vernor (1993), “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, 11–22, Proceedings of a symposium cosponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, Westlake, Ohio, March 30–31.

Gregory Marks

Original posted on December 14, 2019 by thewastedworld

Paraphrasing a passage from Marx in the Grundrisse, Stavros Tombazos remarks that “every economy is in the end an economy of time” (2014, 13). This is to say that the productivity of labour, the accumulation of wealth, and the circulation of goods and resources which make up an economy in its broadest sense are all components of a particular organisation of time. Changes to this economic organisation are therefore felt not only in the transformations they effect materially, but also in the order of temporality and the rhythms of life possible under a particular economic system. This fact that the passage of time, which is so often taken for a given, is in actuality conditioned by the material and economic conditions in which we live is nowhere more apparent than in our present moment of climate change and ecological catastrophe.

Two long centuries of industrial capitalism have left us with a perception of time which is no longer adequate to the material conditions now reshaping our lives. The ecological historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz typify this old order of time by its dependence on the extraction of fossil fuels: “The continuous time of industrial capitalism,” they write, was “projected onto cultural representations of the future, conceived as a continuous progress unfurling to the rhythm of productivity gains” (2016, 203). The shock of our present moment is that this steady and linear increase in productivity, conceptualised as the natural progress toward a tomorrow greater than today, was only ever the product of a temporary influx of energy from a diminishing resource. As Rob Nixon writes, “in this interregnum between energy regimes, we are living on borrowed time—borrowed from the past and from the future,” with the continuation of the status quo only accelerating us “toward an abbreviated collective future as fossils in the making” (2011, 69).

In the twilight years of fossil capitalism we see the emergence of a new organisation of time in which the present is no longer able to fuel itself at the expense of the future, and the accumulated destruction of the past returns at a planetary level. To address this disjunction between the time of capital and the temporalities of nature upon which it feeds, I will offer an account of the metabolic rift theory of contemporary ecosocialists and attempt to expand this metabolic account into more monstrous territory by way of Marx’s own characterisation of capital’s vampiric thirst. Consequently, I wish to suggest Walter Benjamin’s approach to history, nature, and capital as a potential bridge between the metabolic account of capital’s planetary depredation and the project of ideological critique required to lift the haze of our temporal stasis and dispel the vampire’s curse for good.

I: THIRST FOR ACCUMULATION

In the first volume of Capital, Marx writes that “labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. […] Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature” (1976, 283). Not merely an action taken upon nature, labour is the act of controlling the exchange between humanity and nature and the mutual transformation that result from that exchange. As has been remarked upon by the ecosocialists John Bellamy Foster (2000), Paul Burkett (2014), and Kohei Saito (2018), Marx’s conception of labour and the relation it establishes between humanity and nature hinges upon the concept of metabolism. Borrowed from the agronomist Justus von Liebig, Marx’s conception of metabolic exchange draws from its origins in chemistry, as “an incessant process of organic exchange of old and new compounds through combinations, assimilations, and excretions so that every organic action can continue,” and is applied “not just to organic bodies but also to various interactions in one or multiple ecosystems, even on a global scale, whether ‘industrial metabolism’ or ‘social metabolism’” (Saito 2018, 69-70).

In any material system, whether it involves bodies or machines, or if it occurs at the scale of an individual or a society, necessarily involves a metabolic exchange of chemicals and energy to keep that system in motion. Like the economy at large, metabolism is here characterised as a temporal relation, describing the rates of exchange between a given system and its natural foundations. What has emerged under capitalism, however, is a particular disjunction between natural and economic temporalities, tearing an ever widening metabolic rift between them. We now face a “contradiction of nature’s time versus capital’s”—as Paul Burkett writes:

“Capitalism’s accelerated throughput involves a conflict between the time nature requires to produce and absorb materials and energy versus the competitively enforced dynamic of maximum monetary accumulation in any given time period by all available material means” (2014, 112).

Under capitalism the metabolism between humanity and nature is pushed out of joint, not simply in a Malthusian trap of consumption outstripping production, but through the complex web of exchanges and processes by which capital trades short-term gains in profit for a long future of pernicious outcomes. McKenzie Wark remarks:

“Marx’s example of metabolic rift was the way nineteenth-century English farming extracted nutrients such as nitrates from the soil, which growing plants absorbed, which farmers harvested as crops, which workers in the cities ate to fuel their industrious labors, and who would then shit and piss the waste products out of their private metabolisms. Those waste products, including the nitrates, flow through run-off and sewers and pour out to sea. Whole industries for making artificial fertilizer would arise to address this rift—in turn causing further metabolic rifts elsewhere” (2015, xiv).

Whereas previous societies met natural limits at local levels, in the forms of soil exhaustion and resource depletion, capitalism constantly moves further and further afield to expand the scope of its markets, seize resources from abroad, and dispossess its periphery of labour and lands. Each limit which manifests on a local level is transcended and passed over to seek new sources of accumulation. Yet, as Marx makes clear, “from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it” (1973, 410).

Although able to escape or even feed upon the market fluctuations of natural crises by exploiting the elasticity of material limits, capital cannot overcome these limits entirely, and instead searches widely for means of delaying the inevitable. In Kohei Saito’s words: “Capital always tries to overcome its limitations through the development of productive forces, new technologies, and international commerce, but, precisely as a result of such continuous attempts to expand its scale, it reinforces its tendency to exploit natural forces (including human labor power) in search of cheaper raw and auxiliary materials, foods, and energies on a global scale” (2018, 96). Each temporary crisis overcome only offsets systemic collapse in the present by increasing the scope of the next crisis, so that eventually the entire earth is caught in the metabolic rift and a real global limit is reached.

II: UNDER THE VAMPIRE’S SPELL

With “its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour,” coupled with its relentless feeding upon both present and future life, it is no wonder that Marx gestures toward the vampire to characterise capital (1976, 375). In a now famous passage from Capital’s first volume, Marx describes capital as “dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” and elsewhere as driven by a “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour”  (1976, 342; 367). The vampire emerges here not only as a figure out of time, the dead which will not die, but as a conspicuously metabolic monster, which is driven not by malice or moral failure, but by a primal drive to sustain itself on the vital processes of the living. The vampire as metabolic monstrosity is not original to Marx, and may be found in Liebig’s own writings on agronomy, in which he remarks—on the topic of the imperial seizure of guano and other fertilisers from around the world—that “Great Britain seizes from other countries their conditions of their own fertility… Vampire-like, it clings to the throat of Europe, one could even say of the whole world, sucking its best blood” (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, 186-7).

Beyond its polemical flourish, the evocation of the vampire plays the fundamental role of revealing in a single image the hidden mechanisms of capital’s bloodied feast. As Foster and Burkett remark: “Marx’s use of metabolism was not ‘analogical’, but was meant to promote the basis for a materialist and dialectical understanding of the human productive relation to nature” (2016 35-6). Similarly, I wish to argue that capital is not merely like a vampire, but literally exercises a vampiric relation with the living both in its parasitic thirst for accumulation and in the psychic bondage it exercises over its victims. In addition to characterising capital as predominated by metabolic processes, the vampiric metaphor brings with it the connotations of bewitchment, invisibility, and the thraldom of the victim to the vampire. In effect, the conjunction of vampire-capital merges the logic of metabolism with the ideological apparatus that conceals it. As David McNally writes in Monsters of the Market:

“Capital’s great powers of illusion lie in the way it invisibilises its own monstrous formation. In endeavouring to pull off the magic-cap of modernity, Marx sought a confrontation with monstrosity. He set out to reveal the legions of vampires and werewolves that inhere in capital so that they might be banished” (2011, 114).

Just as the time of capitalist production instils in those caught within it the rhythms of industry and the progressive increase of productive forces, the occlusion of its metabolic imbalance exercises its own temporal logic. Capital doesn’t only drain the living of their lifeblood, but does so at times and intervals which, at least for the time being, evade direct perception. Counter to the theories of Max Weber, for whom modernity was the triumph of reason over myth, we may refer Walter Benjamin’s proposition that: “Capitalism was a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces” (1999, K1a,8). The identification of capital’s metabolic relation to humanity and nature as vampiric goes some way in piercing through the new myths of capitalism’s dream-filled sleep. Firstly, it dispels the ideological haze that disguises the slow desiccation of labour and nature under capitalism as just or necessary. As McNally remarks:

“If there is a Marxist Gothic, then, it is one that insists, amongst other things, on journeying through the night spaces of the capitalist underworld, on visiting the secret dungeons that harbour labouring bodies in pain” (2011, 138).

Secondly, it reveals that the cyclical crises and disasters of capitalism are not abnormalities or irregularities in the upward arch of progress, but are rather the throes of pain of myriad metabolisms caught between the vampire’s fangs. As Benjamin writes:

“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. […] Hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now” (1999, N9a,1).

III: WAKE IN FRIGHT

Benjamin’s project of uncovering the dark, magical underbelly of capitalist modernity—what Margaret Cohen (1993) has called a form of “Gothic Marxism”—puts him in welcome company among the vampires and werewolves of Marx’s imaginary. But for all Benjamin’s success as a critic of culture, ideology, and history, his relevance to an ecologically-conscious Marxism is less clear. Writing in Marx’s Ecology, John Bellamy Foster sets himself apart from the Western Marxists for their failure to take the materialist account of nature seriously. “The Frankfurt School,” Foster writes, “developed an ‘ecological’ critique which was almost entirely culturalist in form, lacking any […] analysis of the real, material alienation of nature, for example, Marx’s theory of metabolic rift” (2000, 245).

By way of a conclusion, I’d like to put this claim under pressure on two fronts: Firstly, with the claim that in Benjamin—if not in other Frankfurt thinkers—we do in fact find a thoroughly materialist account of nature, which both refuses any account of history separate from its natural conditions and any theorisation of nature impervious to historical alteration. Secondly, I wish to argue that within Benjamin’s philosophy of nature we also discover hints of a metabolic relation between humanity and nature which will allow us to bridge the gap between a Gothic Marxist critique of ideology and the ecological thought necessary for a twenty-first century Marxism.

From his early works through to his last, Benjamin’s thought returned not only to the question of nature and its place within the course of history, but also the moment when the “antithesis of history and nature” is undone, and “history passes into the setting” as another component of a purely material world (2019, 81). This entry of history into nature—and nature into history—preoccupies Benjamin’s thought in his final unfinished work, The Arcades Project, in which the history of the nineteenth century is conceived in naturalistic terms as composed of fossils from a vanished age. From out of the rubble of this earlier stage of capitalism, Benjamin pieces together a genealogy of late capitalism to reveal the ideological effects that emerge when history and nature are conceptually divorced. As Susan Buck-Morss writes:

“Whenever theory posited ‘nature’ or ‘history’ as an ontological first principle, this double character of the concepts was lost, and with it the potential for critical negativity: either social conditions were affirmed as ‘natural’ without regard for their historical becoming, or the actual historical process was affirmed as essential” (1977, 54).

In Benjamin’s own terms, so long as the modern environments of “architecture, fashion,” and “even the weather” are left unconsidered as products of human intention, “they are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing, and the like. They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges” (1999, K1,5). What we take to be merely “natural,” whether it is the drive for profit or a change in the weather, exists for us only unconsciously until we recognise the mutually constitutive relationship between these seemingly natural facts and the history which we collectively create. Without this moment of awakening to our own natural history, the course of historical events seem inevitable and beyond our grasp. “To the dreaming collective,” writes Benjamin, “the decline of an economic era seems like the end of the world itself” (1999, R2,3). In our own era of apocalyptic foreboding we are in dire need of a politics able to pierce through this myth of inevitable catastrophe to confront the ecological and economic disjunction at its heart.

Despite its seeming inevitability as a fact of nature, the “ecological rift is, at bottom, the product of a social rift: the domination of human being by human being” (Foster et al. 2010, 47). “Accordingly,” writes Kohei Saito, “Marx’s socialist project demands the rehabilitation of the humans-nature relationship through the restriction and finally the transcendence of the alien force of reification (2018, 133). Or, as Benjamin put it many years prior, the vital task of our technical knowledge “is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man” (1979, 104). Here we see clearest the metabolic potential of Benjamin’s natural philosophy: To master not nature itself but the relation between humanity and nature is to understand the metabolic exchanges which conjoin earthly processes and human affairs. But what Benjamin’s writing also makes clear is that an understanding of our metabolic relation to the earth is not sufficient in itself. To be politically effective an ecologically-conscious Marxism must be coupled with an insight into the ideological structures that obscure our metabolic relations and instil in us a faith in temporalities of infinite progress or inevitable disaster. The vampiric grip of capital, which obscures the means of its mastery even as it deploys them upon humanity and nature alike, can only be cast off by a conscious and collective mastery of our relations to nature and the initiation a new metabolism with the earth.

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Bibliography

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