I’m—Oh, what is that word? It’s so big. And so complicated. And so sad.
—Doctor Who (The word is “alive.”)
Let’s drop the deadly concept of survival. A glance at Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz shows how the most virulent form of death culture marks a rigid and thin separation between life and death. “Survival” is the key word: This is sheer “living on,” yet this is fissured from within between trying not to be dead, and waiting to be dead (the “Müsselmäner”). The fissure is an artifact of the industrial violence done to the victims. When Nazi logistics meets actually existing people, all kinds of uncanny beings “between” the rigid categories of life and death begin to manifest.
Logic doesn’t like this very much because logic doesn’t like ambiguity. In traditional logic, there is no room for a middle zone, the zone that one encounters in regular “life.” Yet actual “life” as opposed to Life with a capital L inhabits this excluded middle zone. What is called “life” is a hesitancy between two different kinds of death: blind machination and total nonexistence. Life as such cannot be opposed to disability. A limb is always a prosthetic limb, an eye is always an artificial one. The engine of evolution is mutation for no reason, such that it is impossible to tell when a new lifeform shows up between a variation and a monstrosity.
But logic, with its “Law” of Noncontradiction and its consequent Law of the Excluded Middle, prohibits the very shades of gray that define small-l life as such. What does this tell us about logic? That it is, as Nietzsche argued, a product of the agricultural age (we live in a version of Mesopotamia) with its patriarchies and its caste systems. Humankind must be thought through this excluded middle, spectral realm between the two kinds of death, not as some idealized living substance. Human life is less spectacular, less grandiose, less vital; more ambiguous, more disturbing and more encompassing. Only then can we think humankind outside of the logistics that resulted in neoliberal capitalism. Let’s distinguish this concept of life from other minimal definitions of life, for instance, in utilitarianism or in the notion of sheer sur-vival, or “living on.”1 This is not to oppose mere living on with some whole and healthy bland vitality.
Fragility is a basic ecological category because it’s a basic ontological category. If a thing is exactly what it is yet never as it appears, it is broken from within. To exist is to be disabled. Every limb is a prosthetic limb. Creativity can happen precisely because of this ontological disability, not in spite of it. Living on is a continual thread, very thin but continual. Creative life is a miracle that can only be achieved by the disabled. Humankind is disabled in an irreducible way.
LIVE EVIL: PATRIARCHAL LIFE AND OBJECT UNDEATH
Life (capital L) is hostile to actually existing lifeforms. This is because of a default ontology, a substance ontology, hardwired into social space. It holds that to exist is to be a constantly present something or other beneath or beyond or despite appearances: over yonder, as in the idea of Nature, which also appeared as a function of an agricultural system.
An algorithm is simply a recipe: take two eggs, beat them, stir in a heated pan with some butter for a few moments—hey presto, a small bowl of scrambled eggs. Settle down in fixed dwellings surrounded by fields, define and repel weeds and pests, maximize the juiciness of your corn kernels at the expense of their flowers … One just needs to leave the algorithm running for a sufficient amount of time, and one can watch as the latest version succeeds in instigating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. Because humans wanted to avoid the mild global warming of the early Holocene, their algorithm ended up generating far, far worse global warming. Because they wanted to transcend the web of fate and the anxiety-provoking loop structure of being, the Paleolithic realm of the Trickster, humans doubled down, further entangling themselves in the web of fate.
Isn’t this the plot of every tragedy? And not surprisingly, because tragedy is a way for humans to compute agricultural logistics; the computation is necessarily limited, as it’s a symptom of agrilogistics, the logistics of a certain agricultural mode (the Mesopotamian one) and its logical structure.2 Logistics are how things are organized and implemented; this organization has an implicit logic that is often occluded. The difference perhaps is similar to the one between acting out and being aware. A glance at the way phosphorus, a major agricultural chemical, has affected the biosphere will be enough to convince anyone of the problems of agrilogistics. The tragic mode in which we are caught vis-á-vis the current ecological emergency is an aesthetic product of the very algorithm that engendered the emergency.
How can we find our way out of tragedy space? This is a question that, in a larger context, means, how can we find our way out of agrilogistic configuration space, now requiring industry and computing prostheses to maintain its execution? Life as such is a tragic concept. Just think of poor Oedipus, nailed to the side of that mountain: a little baby, barely alive. Life means barely alive.
Agrilogistics has been effective since the beginning: you turn your farmland into a desert, and you move west. Within a short while, patriarchy develops as a direct consequence of agrilogistic functioning. A massively oppressive social hierarchy then emerges rapidly, with its king—Oedipus is a victim of the syndrome associated with incompetent father-kings, which one could name the Laius complex.3 The history of civilization, which looks like a long retreat from unintended consequences. What is bizarre is how some humans (“Westerners”) happily let the program run and run and run, no matter what—it became extremely unpleasant soon after it started. It’s even possible that the mild warming of the Holocene was itself caused by large-scale agriculture, thus suggesting that the Anthropocene has had two phases.4 In either case, what is called Nature is simply the smooth periodicity of Holocene Earth systems. Either this was an artificial construct induced at least in part by humans, or it was a happy coincidence for the construction of the anthropocentric theater of operations, providing a suitably comfortable nonhuman backdrop that agrilogistics could rely on and forget about.
The thin, rigid life–non-life boundary established by the functioning of agrilogistic software is a key component of the world this functioning has created. If we don’t like what has happened, we are going to need to find a different concept of whatever a life-form is. We are going to have to relax the life–non-life boundary. The default utilitarianism encoded into Mesopotamian space contains an implicit axiom: more existing is always better than any quality of existing. This eventually generates the population paradox, discussion of which is significantly taboo even for open-minded, humanistic scholars living within Mesopotamian space. According to this paradox, to have trillions of humans living in a state near to that of Primo Levi’s Müsselmäner is always better than to have billions of humans living in a state of absolute ecstasy.5
The fact that when you blow it up to this scale it looks totally absurd should warn you that in the time of hyperobjects—the awareness of and the creation of massively distributed beings, of which we can only see little spatiotemporal pieces at a time—this default utilitarianism obviously no longer functions. It wasn’t functioning very well in the first place. But now the software has been running for so long, we are able to look at it down a microscope or blow it up to Earth magnitude so as to study it—and, unfortunately, suffer from it.
Control over birth and the birthing body and subjection of women is tied to the default substance ontology and its existence-no-matter-what utilitarianism. Patriarchy intertwines with speciesism and anthropocentrism. Nonhumans, the totality of which are called Mother Earth, are regarded as infinitesimally and infinitely malleable substances; and, in the post-Kantian upgrade of this concept, these substances aren’t even substances until humans have formatted them.
More existing at any cost implies a substance ontology whereby objects are mere lumps of extension decorated with accidents. Long before this was formalized (by Aristotle or by reductionist atomism), and thousands of years before the formalization of utilitarianism at the start of the Anthropocene, the default substance ontology was directly coded into social space. Undoing it implies dismantling that social space. The ontological project of dismantling the metaphysics of presence and the anthropocentric definition of nonhumans as manipulable extension units is a political project when considered at this temporal scale—the scale of global warming and extinction.
Mary Daly was quite correct. We live in a death culture, a culture of overkill—Freud’s death drive is always a mechanism of overkill—whereby the soft boundaries of plant and animal cells become the rigid, smooth boundaries of plastic, having been turned into oil.6 We harden and harden the social cell walls quite literally: we use fossilized plant and animal cells to make oil to make plastics such as Mylar and latex, that shiny, smooth, beautiful, protective BDSM membrane. The death drive is precisely the soothing survival mode of agrilogistics, and it is in charge of the concept of Life. The relentless pursuit of relentless life just is death and extermination. The capitalist concept of growth, for example, is a mode of this pursuit.7
Art and human sexuality are two of the very few places left on Earth in which the death logic can be played with, subverted, parodied, bent. Sexual selection is even more Kantian than Kant—there is utterly no utilitarian reason for sexual reproduction. Sexual selection is absurdly expensive from DNA’s point of view, and sexual selection is done fundamentally for no reason. Arguments that beautiful iridescent wing cases are evidence of a lifeform’s virility are circular and question-begging. If being alive was really about just getting on with it and damn the torpedoes of appearance, all lifeforms would be cloning ourselves. There are much more efficient ways of displaying power than having beautiful wing cases. Lifeforms themselves defy the logic that rips appearance away from being.
Mesopotamian social space confronts us with a stark choice between two kinds of death—relentless life (as in the seemingly interminable abortion “debate” over the control of women’s bodies) and absolute nonexistence. One can have bland lumps of extension to which you can do anything, sadistically—or nothing at all.
“Life” actually exists between these two deaths. It is a quivering or a shimmering without mechanical input, whereby objects move all by themselves without requiring an external motive force. The quivering is now observable in tiny objects that are nevertheless far larger than the subatomic particles to whose scale such unruly behavior was restricted by the correlationist Standard Model.8 Another way of saying this is that the intrinsic motility of things implies that appearing and being are inextricable, yet weirdly different at the same time, in defiance of agrilogistic functioning, which also generates the logical “Law” of Noncontradiction that has never been proven formally, because it seems so obvious within agrilogistic social space. Ibn Sina (or Avicenna, the Persian philosopher who flourished around 1000 CE) gets to the point and backs up the law with the threat of torture: that’s the spirit, like how Doctor Johnson made a kicking sound and took it to be an argument about the existence of kickable things, or how (slightly more violently) the Inquisition demanded that one confess one’s nonbelief in a certain concept and must therefore be burned.9
Movement happens because appearance and being slide over one another, are different yet the same, as if being were the loop and appearance were the twist in that loop that creates a Möbius strip. You simply can’t tell where that twist begins. There is no nice little dotted line or city wall or hedgerow or concept of inside and outside that will tell you. A Möbius strip is a non-orientable surface, by which topology means that it has no inside or outside, no front or back, no top or bottom. A lifeform is exactly this non-orientable entity; if tiny mirrors in a vacuum at absolute zero can emit infrared light without being mechanically pushed, you can have a beautiful wing case for no particular reason, and you can find it sexy just because. The nonconceptuality of Kantian beauty extends at least to beetles and butterflies and fish.10
We really, really don’t like entities to shimmer without mechanical input. Even standard-issue quantum theory wants to limit this disco to the things that exist at or below about 10–17 centimeters in diameter. In the sado-thanatological space of agrilogistics, the intrinsic shimmering of being, being shimmering with appearance, is known as a spectral, undead, unholy, heretical taboo or as an esoteric secret given only to those who have made it up to the VIP lounge of agricultural-age religions such as Hinduism or Christianity. Defanged by making it up to the top floor, you are given a heavily mediated version in which you are told you yourself are god, directly, and the point is just to notice that. It’s funny, like an iridescent wing case. Axial Age religion can’t help sprouting exotic esoteric flowers at the top of its supposedly sensible stem.
In non-agrilogistic space, otherwise known as “Paleolithic” (a pejorative and reifying term) or “indigenous,” the shimmering is known as magic. It applies to all objects, whether alive by Mesopotamian standards or not. A First Peoples entity is dead or alive, and it’s impossible to tell exactly which.
We Mesopotamians are forbidden from stepping outside Mesopotamian thought space. To do so designates you as insane or stupid—for instance, you might be accused of being a primitivist or of appropriating non-Western cultures. All that stuff about how nonhumans have spirits shimmering around them, or is it within them, or is it beside them, is reserved for the distant past and for those who in French are called “aliens” (the mad), a telling term for beings beyond the pale, the boundary marker of the agrilogistic dwelling structure. Scoffing or wondering at the idea of foraging for nuts and berries is a displaced way of trying to suppress the ontological shimmering. Whether a shimmering entity is alive or not is impossible to determine without prefabricated concepts. The life–non-life distinction is impossible to maintain; all beings are better thought as undead, not as animate or as inanimate.
In the chapter that follows we shall consider what a species might be without the default substance ontology of agrilogistics. A shimmering, undead, spectral being—an electron, a mouse, a skyscraper, a social movement—is an X-being, intrinsically endowed with superpowers. We can comprehend this precisely through the X that Kant himself uses to describe the one thing he allows to be withdrawn: transcendental synthetic judgments a priori. He calls them the “Unknown = X.”11 But now, release the anthropocentric copyright control on this superpower, and let it belong not just to mathematization of extensional space and time, not only to logical propositions and all other ideal phenomena such as thinking, hoping, wishing, hating (Husserl)—and not only to humans, in the way they ex-sist according to Heidegger and Lacan, but to any entity whatsoever, an idea, a flower, a word, a poem, a tree frog, the biosphere.
There is a term for this flickering, shadowy X-power: the term is evil. And as art deals in shadows and specters in excess of what seems implicit in and what emerges from agrilogistic software, agricultural philosophy has very frequently thought it as a domain of evil, as a Platonic cave of forgotten Paleolithic dreams. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, religion tries to remove spirit animals or “dæmons” that are attached to the persons of children, hovering around them like witches’ familiars. Patriarchal religion is precisely a device for excising the X-power of things and the way they are shadowed or haunted by futural versions of themselves that just won’t stay still, dæmons that sit on your shoulder. And this is because patriarchal religion is a direct consequence of an even more efficient machine whose ruthless oblation of spectrality now goes by the name of the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. For the sake of lifeforms, it is time to release this seemingly evil spectral shimmering from its confinement in the realm of art and start allowing porpoises and humans to have it, too.