Humankind - Timothy Morton

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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

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