Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself “walks,” it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook.
—Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
Consider a phenomenon I shall call “correlationism revelation mode.” My investigation will proceed in a psychoanalytic manner, by noting the inner pressure that seems to distort this mode: where does it come from?
There is a rhetorical pattern shared by descriptions of correlationism, aka post-Kantian philosophy and related cultural objects. It goes like this: “Boy oh boy will you ever be surprised when you find out that the object entails the subject! It will rock your world!” Even Kant works up a good head of steam about it, using the phrase “Unknown = X,” as we just saw. This killer phrase evokes an approaching menace: you can’t see it but it’s real …! In Kant’s case, the X turns out to be the transcendental subject, which seems attached to the human like a balloon.
Or, consider Heidegger. Being and Time is structured as a narrative reveal of Dasein: it slowly creeping up on the reader, boy oh boy is this going to be awesome …! Or Lacan. I have attended literary theory classes where the teacher makes a point of remarking, “Are you ever in for a surprise!” just before teaching his works. The surprise is that reality is a construct—amazing! Correlationism revelation mode appears very strongly in New Age literature. It often exclaims, “This is amazing, you never knew this before, but …” Consider for instance the tenor of the movie What the Bleep Do We Know!?1
From at least The Tao of Physics on, correlationism revelation mode has affected how we talk to one another about quantum theory.2 Correlationism revelation mode appears in a whole array of cultural and literary criticism, Buddhist handbooks … it’s everywhere. The “ideology of the aesthetic” works in the region of this mode. “Social space is fragmented but there is this thing, it glues everything back together, it’s amazing! Saved!” There is an element of empowerment against crude reductionist materialism operating in each case. We seem not able to get enough of surprising ourselves with correlationism. It’s like watching someone with hippocampus damage “waking up” again and again and again every five minutes, in a loop. Repeated over and over, it couldn’t be more boringly conventional. One suspects that repetition is evidence of some unconscious aspect of what’s going on: I’m out of the loop! I’m out of the loop! I’m out of the loop! I’m … It’s oddly like Whiggish history, the kind that looks back at the past, say to the Roman Empire, and finds the bourgeoisie to be rising. Amazement and predictability weirdly overlap.
It has, in fact, been two centuries over which we’ve been telling ourselves that we’re going to be amazed when we find that objects are blank screens for the purposes of (human) projection. Often, it’s done in the mode of showing people they have even more power over nonhumans: “Once we used to manipulate extensional lumps, mostly by pushing them around mechanically. But now, check this out! We can format them before we even talk about manipulating them!” Correlationism revelation mode, no matter the intention of the discourse in which it appears, is a mode of sadistic enjoyment in which one can do anything to anything.
It’s not what you think but how you think that is so often where the problem lies. Is it that people really don’t know that we’ve been telling ourselves this for two hundred years? Is it that we want to reassure ourselves, over and over, just how manipulable things are, because the fact is that they aren’t manipulable? Is there something about revelation mode that is hardwired into correlationism itself?
Or are we repeating surprise mode over and over because there is something buried in the message that we hope, in the back of our minds, repetition will reveal? Kant’s thought is a repression-sublimation of what he knew about Mesmer and Swedenborg and animal magnetism. Animal magnetism is Mesmer’s term for a force that surrounds and penetrates lifeforms and acts in a nonlocal, telekinetic, telepathic and hypnotic way on them to produce various effects. Obi Wan Kenobi describes it in Star Wars; the Nyae Nyae !Kung call it N!ow.3 But what happens within correlationism is a privatization of this telekinetic force—it’s as if you could reduce the Force to just one dot and put that dot firmly in the subject-object correlation. Religion melted in mid 1700s Europe and the “paranormal” leaked out; thinkers became fascinated, often trying to contain it or bowdlerize it. The historical sequence, then, is from animal magnetism to hypnotism to psychoanalytic transference. By the start of the twenty-first century, we arrive at mirror neurons. Thank god, there are extension lumps in that direction, too. Scientism breathes a sigh of relief, and so does correlationism. No need to worry about sounding like Yoda.
Kantian beauty is found in this anxious region. It’s a bowdlerized version of telepathy or telekinesis, something like agency or liveliness emanating from something like an inanimate being, a painting or a piece of music. But it has been restricted to just one place in the universe (the interface between the artwork and the human subject), and restricted within that to a kind of “thinkfeel,” the experience of reasoning as such (it’s not useful or functional in any way). Can we hear Kant saying, “Wow, this is so amazing!” and another part of him saying, “This is not weird and sexy! I promise!” If he lets down his guard he’s going to transmute into Yoda, and he half knows it.
It’s as if the mode contradicts the message. We seem to be trying to hear something profound and weird, outside of Western philosophical space but somewhat contained in religion, “spirituality.” Is it like repressed Paleolithic thought? A thought space that includes “spooky action at a distance”? It’s embarrassing how easy it is to find it if one tries, and it’s become evident that this is a key feature of physical causality.4 If one de-privatizes correlationism, one arrives quickly at some idea that everything has agency, everything is “alive,” possibly “conscious”; or that consciousness is just another mode of access among equal others, and so on. There is no need for surprise.
So, we churn over correlationism, detecting something in it, something whose repression actually founds it, such that it can structurally never talk about it. We churn it like churning stones trying to get butter out. Thus, the repetition is a symptom of something truly sad. We can’t let ourselves go there. And, tragic irony: our very repetition enhances our sense of being able to manipulate. It is a form of Stockholm syndrome, whereby we reproduce the Severing by containing the correlationist explosion to just one, human part of the universe. Our excitement about it is a symptom that something is missing in the very content of traditional correlationism.
SPECTRAL PHENOMENOLOGY
What we encounter in the case of correlationism surprise mode is the specter of paranormal action. Distilled into its most basic form, what is haunting communism is the specter of spectrality itself. Why? Because spectrality is the flavor of the symbiotic real, where everything is what it is, yet nothing coincides exactly with itself. Communist thought needs to embrace the spectral and figure out exactly what comprises it: not spirits in a divine realm, even if that realm has been relocated in the human—that’s the concept of Humanity. Spectrality is nonhumans, including the “nonhuman” aspects of ourselves. A convocation of specters will aid us in imagining something like an ecocommunism, a communism of humans and nonhumans alike.
“Specter’’ could mean “apparition,” but it could also mean “horrifying object,” or it could mean “illusion,” or it could mean “the shadow of a thing.’’5 The word “specter” is spectral by its own definition, wavering between appearance and being. In the specter, we encounter the ghostly presence of beings not yet formatted according to Nature, including the Nature in Marx: nonhumans subjected to human metabolism. Things in themselves haunt data: this is possibly the shortest way of describing the Continental philosophical tradition since Kant. Marx’s version of it is that use-value is already on the human metabolic side of the equation: the spoon exists insofar as it becomes part of how I organize my enjoyment. It’s what we hear in the fifteenth chapter of the first volume of Capital, with its imaginative architects and mechanical bees, namely, the sharp distinction between human being and everything else that Marx inherits from Kant, and in which Kant is still haunted by the specter of Descartes, namely that philosopher’s substance ontology of purely extensional lumps connected mechanically.
The more we think ecological beings—a human, a tree, an ecosystem, a cloud—the more we find ourselves obliged to think them not as alive or dead, but as spectral. The more we think them, the more we discover that such beings are not solidly “real” nor completely “unreal”—in this sense, too, ecological beings are spectral. Since the difference between life and non-life is neither thin nor rigid, we discover that biology and evolution theory are actually telling us that we coexist with and as ghosts, specters, zombies, undead beings and other ambiguous entities, in a thick, fuzzy middle region excluded from traditional Western logic.
Marx distinguishes between humans and living nonhumans. Architects imagine and bees only execute, like computer programs. Unless we want humankind to be anthropocentric, we can’t think like this. Marx also distinguishes between what capital does—it makes tables compute value—and what the paranormal does—it makes tables dance.6 Capitalist tables are like artificial intelligence versions of the architect whereas paranormal tables are like spectral versions of the bee. Ironically, Marx is happier with capitalist tables than with tables that dance. Future communism must be a place where nonhumans such as frogs and bees can dance, and maybe even tables, too.
It simply cannot be proved, as Marx wants to, that the best of bees is never as good as the worst of (human) architects because the human uses imagination and the bee simply executes an algorithm.7 Far more efficient than showing bees have the capacity of imagination (some science begins to move toward this possibility) is to show that it’s impossible to prove that a human can. Prove that I’m not executing an algorithm when I seem to be planning something. Prove that asserting that humans do not blindly follow algorithms is not the effect of some blind algorithm. The most we can say is that human architects pass our Turing test for now, but that is no reason to say that they are in any sense better than bees. It is instead truer to assert that we are hamstrung as to determining whether humans are executions of algorithms or not, casting doubt on our certainty that bees really do only execute algorithms blindly, since that certainty is based on a metaphysical assertion about humans and is thus caught in fruitless circularity.
There are two possible reasons why I can’t prove that I can imagine. Number one: there is no such thing as imagining at all; whatever we call “imagining” can be reduced to some material process. If this first were true, it would also drastically reduce reasons we have to care about lifeforms. An architect is just a deluded bee, and bees are just mechanisms. Number two: what is called “imagination” isn’t directly present; it can’t be pointed to straightforwardly; it has a spectral existence that includes a basic ontological uncertainty. On this view, a bee is a mislabeled architect.
In a world where it is hard to distinguish definitively between life and non-life, it is also hard to distinguish between bees and tables. Since we can’t distinguish very rigidly between humans and bees, the difference between humans and tables shrinks. We are moving toward the object-oriented ontology view that all beings have agency, even mind. Significantly, we can glimpse this when Marx talks about Milton. This poet, second only to Shakespeare in the estimation of English literary history, acted like a silkworm when he wrote Paradise Lost. He didn’t enter into a contract with a publisher in order for that publisher to make money. So, Milton was an “unproductive” worker because he didn’t produce any surplus value.8 Surplus value is produced when the capitalist obtains abstract homogeneous surplus labor time. Milton’s automated, nonhuman, algorithmic behavior—the poem just poured out of him—is valued, while the deliberate, “imaginative” entering into of a contract by a paid author is devalued. Paradise Lost was part of Milton the Silkworm’s “extended phenotype,” the expression of his artistic genome, just as a beaver’s genes don’t end at its whiskers but at her or his dam.
This is an astounding reversal of the architect and the bee. It is the contract writer whose labor has been reduced upwards to an abstract, bland, homogeneous unit of labor time, so that it doesn’t much matter what the writer is expressing. Marx uses “behave” (what bees do) in a positive sense in his notes on Adolph Wagner, in which he defines production differently than the commonly accepted notion, which seems to have much more to do with the reified production socialism is meant to oppose, rather like how we have confused time with the measurement of time:
Men do not by any means begin by “finding themselves in this theoretical relationship to the things of the outside world.” They begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., that is not by “finding themselves” in a relationship, but actively behaving, availing themselves of certain things of the outside world by action, and thus satisfying their needs. (They start, then, with production.)9
Production is biting into a peach. Production is enjoyment, of one’s biting and of the peach, of the nonhuman. Production is love, which includes sheer solidarity with the nonhuman—putting that peach right into your mouth and biting. Production is something you can’t help doing. Production is a silkworm oozing out silk. And so, production is a bee building a hive. The appearance of the writing as such is sharply separated from the substance of writing as labor for profit. But in the case of Milton, the thing (the poet) and its appearance (the poem) are inextricable. There isn’t a mind–body or substance–accidents dualism in operation here. And the dualism has vanished not through reductionism, not by saying that Milton is just a collection of subroutines, but by suggesting, if only in the imagery, that the spontaneously thingly, sensuous quality of Milton-who-can’t-help-it is what emerges as a gorgeous poem. If only in the imagery, this softens the edges of the word “act” and sharpens the agency of the word “behave.”
DANCING NONHUMANS
What was just said is in keeping with Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. Before we get into it, let’s recall the opening paragraph of his explication in Capital:
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing that transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.10
Abstract homogeneous labor time is the goose that lays the golden eggs, that turns M (money) into M´ (more money) by passing through the commodity (C): the famous M–C–M´ formula. Capitalism acts like a drastic version of the default ontology of Western philosophy, reducing things to bland lumps of extension decorated with accidents. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’m good at squeezing and you’re good at hitting. Both actions are irrelevant to abstract labor time, and what they make is irrelevant to making money—whether a chocolate bar or a nuclear weapon. Thus, there is a transcendental gap between my actual labor and what I’m making (a use-value) and the commodity form (the format in which commodities come to determine value, in particular the value of abstract homogeneous labor time). As in Freud’s idea that the secret wish is hidden in the format of a dream not in its manifest content, the secret of capitalism is hidden in the format of exchange value. “Commodity form” doesn’t mean “the shape of this chocolate bar.”
It doesn’t matter what I’m creating or not creating, and it certainly doesn’t matter what I feel or think about it. Specifically, it doesn’t matter that I know that labor produces value—all capitalist theories know it, too. But it also doesn’t matter that I know how commodity fetishism works—by computing the value of abstract labor time, so that chronologically my labor makes this chocolate bar, but logically the exchange value of the chocolate bar makes my labor time a commodity that I’m selling.
To hold that objects have agency, even simply to hold that they are thingly (“dinglich,” Marx’s own word in this passage in Capital), to think objects as sensuous, is not only irrelevant to capitalist operation, so that OOO definitely isn’t a manifestation of commodity fetishism.11 To hold that objects have agency is to resist the abstraction whereby the object becomes a mere blank screen for the computation of value, an extensional lump with a brain that “evolves” concepts rather like artificial intelligence. Thinking that tables can dance is not commodity fetishism. The commodity format is the exchange value structure in which abstract labor time is produced as a bland homogeneous lump, an extensional lump like a body, with a price on it like a mind that makes that body move around, as in Cartesian dualism. This is about as far from OOO as possible. Capitalism, if anything, is a metastasized form of idealism, in which just one nonhuman is allowed to have agency—a hyperobject. The hyperobject consists of homogeneous abstract labor time, abstracted from actual labor, which is a narrow bandwidth in the broader spectrum of production, namely creativity and its pleasures, including the sensation of biting into a peach and letting the juice run down your chin.
This all means that there is no good reason not to consider at least the sensuousness and specificity of nonhumans and the sensuousness and specificity of creativity. Commodity fetishism isn’t about just the alienation of humans, but the alienation of any entity whatsoever from its sensuous qualities, as we just saw. Production, as in the writing of a brilliant poem, is the thing you can’t help doing, your species-being. This is exactly how it can be exploited. It just happens anyway, so that the capitalist can dip a bucket into its flow to extract labor time from it and homogenize it. The capitalist exploits this fact, the non-chosen, non-“imaginative” part of me that I don’t have to plan, the fact that I’m a being like a silkworm. Which is precisely why my labor can be equated with the productivity of the soil—both are conveniently spontaneous bits of “nature” that capitalism can turn into blank screens for value computation.
This spontaneous part of myself tyrannizes me as if it were an external being—this is alienation. It is as if capitalism has forced a bionic soul into my poor helpless body, animating it like a Cartesian zombie. Now, its sensuality and specific creativity are just veils. This is the true horror of capitalism: it turns me not into an object but into a parody of a person, an anthropocentric machine with a soul, as in Descartes or Aristotle; and that soul isn’t mine. No wonder Aimé Césaire proclaimed that he was for “proletarianization and mystification.”12 Demystification, rudely stripping the appearance from things and laying them bare, is the capitalist operation par excellence. I am pouring chocolate into a mold in just this precise way. Neither me nor the chocolate nor the mold are exhausted by the ways in which we mutually access one another. At the same time, homogeneous abstract labor time is being siphoned off. Even if I’m not suffering terribly, I have been exploited, as in alien abduction.
The nonhuman aspect of humans, the fact that production is how they behave, is exactly what capitalism exploits, along with other nonhumans such as the microbes in the soil. In a strong sense, Marxism already includes nonhumans! And this is where we touch the symbiotic real, because species-being implies symbiosis. Capital is anthropocentric and this is precisely how it messes with humankind, human species-being as a part of the symbiotic real. The part of the human that has a foot in the nonhuman. Like phenomenological style, of which ego is at best a very thin and distorted slice, the nonhuman aspect of the human is precisely what is spoken in the word “humankind.”13 Kindred, friendship, solidarity, symbiosis—this kind-ness is spoken here.
The Enlightenment idea of vanilla mankind and its postmodern flip side, the not-all set of incommensurable differences, are both reflexes of capital. Both are anthropocentric. Both distort humankind. Un-distortion of humankind requires amplifying the nonhuman symbiotic real implied in the concept of species-being. So, what happens when we turn up the volume of the nonhumans within Marxism?
No longer able to exclude nonhumans with a straight face, thought is confronted with its anthropocentrism. Bees and architects are important because for Marx, in the lineage of Kant, there is a Decider that makes things real. For Marx, the Decider is human economic relations. But ecological relations subtend human relations of all kinds, and ecological relations extend beyond them throughout the biosphere. Humans can organize their enjoyment (economics) because they participate in the symbiotic real.
Human economic relations are simply general ecological relations with arbitrary pieces missing—colossal numbers of pieces. Either Marxism can be thought in a way that includes this irreversible knowledge, or it cannot. If it can, then communism must involve greater and better relations with nonhumans than the ones in play right now. As Marx says in the chapter on machines in Capital, capitalism produces the misery of the worker and the depletion of the soil:
All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility … Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.14
Soil is decomposing life forms and the bacteria whose extended phenotype these life forms are.15 Marx implies nonhumans, yet he erases them—it’s the fertility of the soil whose loss he laments, and this fertility is keyed to human metabolism; the soil is seen as it is accessed by humans. This is anthropocentric soil. But the good news is that the implication of nonhumans means that we might be able to un-erase them within Marxism; such an action seems highly unlikely within the realm of strict capitalist economic theory.
What is called Nature is a way to blind and deafen oneself to the strangeness of the symbiotic real. Ecological awareness, just now occurring to everyone on Earth, is a way to take one’s hands away from one’s ears, to hear a message that was transmitted loud and clear in the later eighteenth century, a message that not even its messengers wanted entirely to hear.
Kant blocked his ears to the implications of his correlationism, that nonhumans could also be correlators and not just correlatees. Kant limited the gap he had discovered to the gap between human beings and everything else. It is time to release the copyright control on this gap. The name of this release is ecological awareness. Ecological awareness is coexisting, in thought and in practice, with the ghostly host of nonhumans. Thinking, itself, is one modality of the convocation of specters in the symbiotic real. To this extent, one’s “inner space” is a test tube for imagining a being-with that our metaphysical rigidity refuses to imagine, like a quaking peasant with a string of garlic, warding off the vampires.
This would not necessarily be a bizarre stretch. Recall that commodity fetishism means that a table, a piece of fruit, a cloud of carbon dioxide, begin to operate like computer programs, chattering with one another about their exchange value as if a coat could become a screen on which were projected the fluctuations of value. The point is that turning tables into platforms for something like an artificial intelligence algorithm that computes exchange value is far stranger than if we accepted that tables could act in a paranormal way, which is to say, a “magical” way outside of normative modernity, by dancing around of their own accord, or telekinetically. That is precisely what Marx says about commodity fetishism: dancing tables are less weird than computing tables.
The future thought that Marx is unable quite to articulate himself is right there, not exactly in the argument but in the imagery. This future thought is strangely rather easy to decipher. In commodity fetishism, spoons and chickens do not have agency: they become the hardware platform for capitalist software. It is far easier than that to allow for the dancing tables of Marx, let alone dancing chimpanzees. We are not erasing the sensuousness of such beings in so doing. It is not that capitalism flirts with the spectral but that capitalism is not spectral enough. Capitalism implies a substance ontology that sharply divides what things are—“normal” or “natural” fixed essences (extensional lumps without qualities)—from how things appear, defanging and demystifying the things, stripping them of qualities and erasing their data. Imagine an ecological future.16 This requires accepting that some forms of mystery are good: “They talk to me about civilization, I talk about proletarianization and mystification” (Aimé Césaire).17
THE SPECTRAL CHEMISTRY OF ECOLOGICAL ATTUNEMENT
The phenomenology of encountering an ecological being—how the encounter unfolds—will give us clues for thinking the spectrality of lifeforms. Meeting an ecological being is a moment at which I encounter something that is not me such that even if this being is obviously part of me—say, my brain—I don’t experience it as part of the supposed whole that makes up “me.” Ecological thought is Adorno’s ideal of thinking as the encounter with non-identity.18 When it isn’t simply pushing preformatted pieces around, thought meets specters, which is to say, beings whose ontological status is profoundly and irreducibly ambiguous.
To encounter an ecological entity is to be haunted. Something is already there, before I think it. When we talk about haunting, what we are talking about is what phenomenology calls givenness. Givenness is the condition of possibility for data (in Latin, “what is given”). There is already a light in the refrigerator before I open the door to see whether or not the light is on. The light’s givenness—it’s a light, not an octopus—is not something I have planned, predicted or formatted. I cannot reduce this givenness to something expected, predictable, planned, without omitting some vital element of givenness as such. Givenness is therefore always surprising, and surprising in surprising ways: surprisingly surprising. Yet in haunting, the phenomenon of the disturbing, surprising given whose surprise cannot be reduced, also repeats itself.
Each time givenness repeats there is no lessening of surprise. Repetition leads not to boredom but to an uncanny sense of refreshment. It is as if I’m tasting something familiar yet slightly disgusting, as if I were to find, upon putting it to my lips, that my favorite drink had mold on its surface. I am stimulated by the very repetition itself: stimulated by boredom. Another term for this is ennui. Ennui is the quintessence of the consumerist experience: I’m stimulated by the boredom of being constantly stimulated. In ennui I heighten the Kantian window shopping of the bohemian or Romantic consumer.
The experience of vicarious experience—wondering what it would be like to be the person who wears that shirt—itself becomes too familiar, slightly disgusting, distasteful. I can’t enjoy it “properly”: I’m unable to achieve the familiar aesthetic distance from which to appreciate it as beautiful (or not). Disgust is the flip side of good taste in this respect: good taste is the ability to be appropriately disgusted by things that are in bad taste. I have had too many vicarious thrills, and now I find them slightly disgusting—but not disgusting enough to turn away from them altogether. I enjoy, a little bit, this disgust. This is ennui.
Since in an ecological age there is no appropriate scale on which to judge things (human? microbe? biosphere? DNA?), there can be no pure, unadulterated, totally tasteful beauty. Beauty is always a little bit weird, a little bit disgusting. Beauty always has a slightly nauseous taste of the kitsch about it, kitsch being the disgusting enjoyment object of the other, disgusting precisely because it is the other’s enjoyment-thing, and thus inexplicable to me. Moreover, since beauty is an enjoyment that hasn’t to do with my ego and is thus a not-me, beauty is always haunted by its spectral double, the kitsch. The kitsch precisely is the other’s enjoyment object: how can anyone in their right mind want to buy this snow globe of the Mona Lisa? Yet there they are, hundreds of them, in this tourist shop.
Since beauty involves me in organizing enjoyment, it is a profoundly economic phenomenon in the interesting sense that its use-value has not yet been determined.19 Beauty provides a way to think economics that crosses over the correlationist boundary between things and data, between what things are and how things appear. Beauty provides a channel through which nonhuman specters can enter. They do not have to be left out in the prefabricated “nature” of bourgeois ideology.
Rather than abolishing beauty, we can remix it for our own purposes. Beauty is always a love letter from an unknown source, a nonlocal telepathic mind-meld with something that might not be conscious, might not be sentient, might not be alive, might not even exist … beauty is a feeling of unconditional solidarity with things, with everything, with anything. Beauty is the nonhuman footprint of a nonhuman—a not-me experience arising in my inner space that bears the trace of a specter. And ennui is when we allow beauty to begin to lose its anthropocentric equalization. In ennui I am not totally turning my back on this sickening world; where would I turn to anyway, since the ecological world is the symbiotic real? Ennui is the correct ecological attunement!
The pathway to nonhumans is through a trapdoor in the ideological superstructure of capitalism, which is exactly why it seems so unacceptable. The very consumerism that haunts environmentalism—the consumerism that environmentalism explicitly opposes and finds disgusting—provides the model for how ecological awareness should proceed. Moreover, this ecological awareness would not depend on the “right” or “proper” ecological being, and thus would not depend on a metaphysical pseudo-fact. Consumerism is the specter of ecology. Ecological awareness must embrace its specter.
In ennui I find myself surrounded and penetrated by entities that I can’t shake off. When I try to shake one off, another one attaches or I find another one is already attached, or that the very attempt to shake it off makes it tighten the grip of its suckers. Isn’t this just the quintessence of ecological awareness, namely the feeling that I am surrounded and penetrated by entities such as stomach bacteria, parasites, mitochondria—not to mention other humans, lemurs and sea foam? I find it slightly disgusting and yet fascinating. I am “bored” in the sense that I find it provocative to include all the beings that I try to ignore in my awareness all the time. Who hasn’t become “bored” in this way by ecological discourse? And who really wants to know that in a world where there is no “away” to flush our toilet waste to, it phenomenologically sticks to us, even after we have flushed it?
Isn’t this abjection experience part of the phenomenology of what Marx calls species-being, when we consider it with an emphasis on the accessee, rather than the accessor? Consider the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
Nature is the inorganic body of a man … in so far as it is not itself a human body. That man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must maintain a constant interchange so as not to die. That man’s physical and intellectual life depends on nature merely means that nature depends on itself, for man is a part of nature.20
If we invert the image of what Marx thinks as human “universality,” we obtain exactly the abject awareness that I can’t peel nonhumans from me without ceasing to be myself. There is no way to be a fully formed Hegelian subject, since this would involve sloughing off the nonhumans (“nature” in the passage above) that are my “inorganic body.” I am a way in which “nature depends on itself”—an elegant paraphrase of “symbiotic real.” I exist as a part of this symbiotic real that is human (and nonhuman) species-being. Within a single page, Marx does go on to say that I differ from nonhumans in my ability to change how I participate in symbiosis, which provides the basis for the strong correlationist interpretation that unlike nonhumans, human species-being is the way in which humans create their own environment, an idea so caught in Hegelian antics that it forgets the simple fact of termites or beavers and any kind of “extended phenotype,” the fact that a spider’s genome includes not only spider legs but also spiders’ webs.21
Let’s continue exploring the phenomenology of the symbiotic real. Consider the Paris Spleen poems of Charles Baudelaire, poet-consumerist par excellence, bohemian inventor of the flâneur, or rather, the one who christened this quintessential, “Kantian” mode of consumption; the poet who originated the notion of ennui. One should read the poems in their entirety for various reasons. First, there is a general structure of feeling across the poems. Second, the provocative titling—exactly the same (“Spleen”) for four poems in sequence in The Flowers of Evil—compels us to read them together, as if the same affect were collapsing, or going to sleep, then queasily restarting each time. Third, this format suggests being haunted, in the sense of being frequented, of an event occurring more than once. We all know there would be no such thing as the uncanny without the notion of repetition. Space permits me only to quote one of these poems:
The month of drizzle, the whole town annoying, a dark cold pours from its urn in torrents on the pale inhabitants of the adjoining cemetery and over the mortals in foggy suburbs.
My cat, looking for a tile to sleep on, fidgets restlessly his thin mangy body; the soul of some old poet trundles down the rainspout with the sad voice of a chilly phantom.
A bumblebee moans, the smoking log backs up in falsetto the congested clock; meanwhile in a game reeking with sordid perfumes—
Mortal descent from an old dropsical dame—the handsome jack of hearts and the queen of spades make sinister small talk about their defunct loves.22
All kinds of incongruous things blend together, even the difference between consumerism and ecological awareness. Living and dead things become confused and weigh on the narrator, depressing him. Ecological awareness interrupts my anthropocentric mania to think myself otherwise than being surrounded and permeated with other beings, not to mention made up of them? Which is to say, isn’t ecological awareness a spectrality that consists of awareness of specters? One is unsure whether a specter is material or illusory, visible or invisible. What weighs on Baudelaire is the specter of his bohemian, Romantic consumerism, his Kantian floating, enjoyment tinged with disgust tinged with enjoyment. Ennui is being surrounded by the spectral presence of evacuated enjoyment.
Somewhere within consumerist possibility space, between defiant rejection (like punk) and perverse acceptance (like pop art), resides this Baudelairean structure of feeling, and it might be very useful for imagining the location of the trapdoor toward the symbiotic realm. You can’t get out through rejection, because the skylight is always within consumerist space: we enter the endless dialectic of authentic versus sell-out. You can’t get out through perverse acceptance either, although this is more promising than rejection: rejection is (because of the paradox I just outlined) a form of acceptance-in-denial. Something like uneasy acceptance of disgust, disgusted acceptance of unease, accepting disgust at ambiguity, accepting ambiguous feelings about disgust … these provide the chemicals that might melt the floor and allow a way through to the symbiotic real and its solidarity hum, a way we locate underneath consumerist possibility space.
When thinking becomes ecological, the beings it encounters cannot be established in advance as living or non-living, sentient or non-sentient, real or epiphenomenal. Biology is founded on this confusion. What we encounter when we access the symbiotic real are spectral beings whose ontological status is uncertain to the extent that we know them in detail as we never have before. Our experience of these spectral beings is itself spectral, just like ennui. Starting the engine of one’s car isn’t what it used to be, since one knows one is releasing greenhouse gases. Eating a fish means eating mercury and depleting a fragile ecosystem. Not eating a fish means eating vegetables, which may have relied on pesticides and other harmful agricultural logistics. Because of interconnectedness, it always feels as if there is a piece missing. Something just doesn’t add up, in a disturbing way. We are never clear of embodiment. We can never achieve cynical escape velocity. We are caught in hypocrisy. We can’t get compassion exactly right. Being nice to bunny rabbits means not being nice to bunny rabbit predators. Giving up in sophisticated boredom is also an oppressive option.
The spectral beings that compose the symbiotic real are disclosed as partial objects. These are parts of a whole that they exceed. Are we dealing with a violation of logic that then forms the basis for turning the ontological camera the other way, and attributing this partiality of the object to (human) fantasy, namely the Freudian version of the correlationist Decider? How we think wholes needs to change: what happens if we take another pathway than reducing objects to the Decider? Perhaps the idea of the partial object is a by-product of a certain set theory, a certain theory about wholes. Perhaps if we changed the meaning of holism, partial objects would be partial on their own, from their own side, not because (human) desire projected a fantasy onto what was essentially a blank screen, even more useless than a mere lump of extended stuff to be manipulated by the human.
God is the being that gets to avoid being a partial object. That should give us a clue as to the origin of the holism that enables this thought in agricultural society, otherwise known as the Neolithic. Explosive holism is born here. So, what we are aiming for must be an implosive holism. According to such a holism, a being such as God wouldn’t matter. We wouldn’t need to prove or disprove God’s existence; that would be cognitively inefficient. Far more efficient would be to imagine that if there were a god of some kind, that god couldn’t be omnipresent or omniscient because it couldn’t be constantly present, because such a being wouldn’t comprise a whole of which we are the components. In explosive holism, the parts are reducible to the whole. We all know what comes next: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport.”23 We are insignificant, because God is more … there.
Hieronymus Bosch depicts hell as a space of obscene enjoyment and horror, the space of partial objects (stomach, buttocks), and a space of symbiosis (birds excreting humans). This is an organicism, but not explosively holist organicism, which is a form of mechanism (Greek “organon,” tool or machine). We could call it anorganic form, to distinguish from the organic, and its opposite, the inorganic. Or consider the meme about First Peoples’ beliefs on being photographed—that to be photographed is to have your “soul” stolen. Isn’t this precisely because the photograph reveals your spectrality? I cannot think myself as “inside here” any more; I’m decisively “over there” in some way; my being is not organically locked together; my “soul” can be detached from other parts of me. Anyone who has experienced the uncanny sound of her or his voice on tape, or investigated the fascination with hearing ghosts on tape or seeing them in photographs, or who has seen their face from the side in a film, has an idea about this kind of partial being.
Explosive holism is part of Marx’s theory of capitalism. Industrial capitalism, the truest face of capitalism, is an emergent property of enough machines making enough machines, linked together in a complex-enough network.24 Capitalism for Marx is another version of the invisible sadist who wants to kill you.
The trouble is, such an idea is itself an example of the very ideological displacement Feuerbach and Marx want to invert: human powers displaced onto a transcendental superbeing. These powers are best thought of not as exclusively human individual powers, but as transpersonal and even trans-species powers, since the lionization of the exclusively human inherent in this concept of ideology is itself an artifact of the Severing. These are powers inherent in the symbiotic real, which Marx recognizes as an extension of the human body, if not of nonhuman bodies. Feuerbach argued that religious statements such as “God is love” are alienated expressions of human powers (“Love is god”). Debugged Feuerbachian ideology theory would proclaim that the seemingly paranormal superpowers displaced onto an explosively holist superbeing are common to all lifeforms, and, since there is no convenient way to contain the concept of non-life within a thin, rigid boundary, to all beings whatsoever.
X-EXISTENCE
We are in fact living in an age of mass extinction, the sixth one on this planet so far—“so far” meaning the roughly four-and-a-half-billion-year history of life on Earth. There have been five others previously: the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction; the late Devonian mass extinction; the Permian mass extinction; the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction; and the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. The objective content of the Anthropocene is the gigantic die-off of lifeforms, as all are sucked in some sense or other into the one-size-fits-all, narrow-diameter temporality pipe of agrilogistics, a program that is still running.
This mass extinction is invisible. It’s the most significant moment for lifeforms on this planet since the dinosaurs got wiped by that asteroid, and we can’t see it directly—we see only spatiotemporal pieces of it. We are the asteroid. Popular stories about “the world without us” or movies such as Melancholia disturbingly displace that fact. An apocalyptic disaster (literally a malfunctioning star) isn’t coming from outer space to kill us. It’s us. A gamma ray burst within six thousand light years can cause a mass extinction. A gigantic surge of methane from the ocean floor triggered by global warming, known as a clathrate gun, caused what we call the End Permian extinction, otherwise known as the Great Dying: all life on Earth right now is descended from the 4 percent that survived that one. And this time, we are the explosive force. And we can’t see it; even scientists find it very difficult to point to. What is disturbing is that the hyperobject has the hallmarks of the forms of entity humans made up early in the agricultural age, the gods of the Axial Age religions. Only, it’s not conveniently located in some beyond only accessible by some top-level human with exclusive access, like the king or whoever, and handily capable of taking my mind off my daily misery. The hyperobject is in my genome, it’s on my oily fingers, it’s in the sound of my starter motor. It’s under my skin and it is my skin. I myself am a tiny crystal on an asteroid.
I confront something like what Kant was calling the Unknown = X: a beautiful, uncanny term for how there must be this transcendental dimension that gives meaning to the empirical one we can experience. I only glimpse it anamorphically, like that skull rotated into a dimension at ninety degrees to the illusionist 3-D space of Holbein’s Ambassadors painting. The Sixth Mass Extinction and humankind are a gigantic shadow and the executant entity of which it’s a gigantic shadow. An individual fish dying isn’t quite it; a fish species dying out isn’t quite it. Me turning the ignition of my car isn’t quite it: that action alone is statistically meaningless. But when you scale these things up, suddenly—and it’s sudden, a quantum jump rather than a smooth transition—this gigantic entity emerges. It was there all along, but I was inside it and I was it, and it’s uncannily dislocated from my empirical experiences and effects in the world. I don’t mean to harm Earth, and in fact I’m not harming Earth. My action is statistically meaningless. But billions of things such as key turnings in ignitions are exactly what is causing global warming and mass extinction. I’m good at seeing my cat and my car as entities because they are anthropocentrically scaled: I can grasp them both figuratively and literally. What’s ironic is that the actual human species, the anthropo- part that some of us are too uncomfortable for various reasons even to name, is the thing I can’t see! To put it in Marxian, the Anthropocene is where I get to glimpse my species-being as a power stands over against me, as when in a club strangely called Earth in 1989 I experienced a rain of human sweat that had accumulated on the ceiling after hours and hours of techno. Parts of everyone were falling, alien, damp, warm, back onto everyone, because of our own repetitive churning.
The uncanny spectrality of mass extinction: colossal, but you can’t point to it directly. Furthermore, we’re talking here about future traces, so they are spectral in that sense too—they haven’t all appeared yet, these traces of beings. This poses a scientific problem. How to find patterns in data that show you that mass extinction is happening is causing scientists to use the language of spectrality. Spectrality itself is the signal and it has an empirical signature, like ectoplasm, in the form of “species rarity”: just a few of a certain kind of fish swimming around down there for some reason, oddly too few.25 It’s like looking at de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street: a girl reduced to silhouette rolls a hoop across an empty street that stretches into the far distance. It’s quiet, too quiet—but it’s not silent. It’s easier to look at slices of rock, core samples from millions of years ago, geological strata that tell you of these absences, conveniently wedged and compacted and foreshortened, than it is to detect the current one, the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. They are nicely present-at-hand, as Heidegger would say, their inconsistencies jut out of the geologic contexture. The other five big mass extinctions are vorhanden. But this one is what Heidegger would call ready-to-hand, zuhanden, because it is part of our human world, our projects, such as taking a flight.
Moreover, the specific project of agrilogistics is precisely a severing of human–nonhuman ties that enables a human confrontation with a seemingly smoothly functioning world—even Heidegger himself thinks that this smooth functioning is itself smoothly functioning. Sealed off from other beings, the concept of world becomes vacuum-sealed and shrink-wrapped. Object-oriented ontology tries to go one level deeper within Heideggerian thought, into the realm of entities that are never exhausted by access at all; not that they last forever, but that they are mysterious or open or unspeakable in some sense. This must mean that worlds are never capable of being smooth, because they always imply gaps between the reality of the entity doing the accessing on the one hand, and the symbiotic real on the other.
The smoothly functioning human world is now malfunctioning precisely because of this gap between our world, with its anthropocentric access modes, and actual reality. And—this is the uncanny part—there we are, woven into the coral reef of actual entities underneath the smoothly gliding submarine of human civilization–we are one of those unspeakable entities! We, as humankind—not as in some racist or speciesist fantasy, which is precisely invented to allow us to believe we can point out what a human being is, in the sense of distinguishing the human from the nonhuman or the inhuman in some rigid way. Human species-being oozes into human awareness. We are the asteroid, which is to say that the gap between the human world and the human species is exactly the cause of the spectrality I’m talking about. It’s also to say that, so far, industrial economic relations between humans, relations based on property (private or state), have had asteroid-like impacts on Earth.
Our world is now malfunctioning sufficiently for us to begin to glimpse the darker, weirder malfunctioning—the sinister mal that might be intrinsic to functioning as such. Spectrality is the mal of this functioning, not just a superficial appearance, but exactly the sound of extinction faintly audible behind the din of the motorcars, its incredible weakness a horrible symptom of its colossal power. And the humanists, the art historians, the literary scholars, the music scholars, the philosophers, the historians, we know this! We know what it is. We’ve been studying this for years, just exactly and precisely this.
To do speculative realism, to do ecological criticism, you don’t need to jump to some incredibly different domain with incredibly different vocabulary. You can use what you have. You just need to relax that anthropocentric reference frame, doesn’t even have to be all the way, just like you don’t have to completely remove the boron rods from a nuclear reactor for something interesting to happen. You just have to let a little bit of the explosion we’ve been trying to contain happen, the explosion we’ve been trying to contain for about two centuries, for as long as the time of industrial fossil fuel burning so far. It started with the steam engine, the general-purpose machine noted by Marx as a vital component of industrial capitalism, and by Paul Crutzen as the instigator of what is now called the Anthropocene.26
It really shouldn’t be surprising to humanist scholars that to see data patterns about entities such as extinction at the right ontological level, you need to look at specters themselves, like studying poetry: the processes operating on you, the reader, are hiding in plain sight in the flickering of language. Normal, old New Leftish scholars of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your anthropocentrism! Come on in, the water’s lovely, which is to say, it’s cold and dark and mysterious and spooky.
Spectrality has become the tool with which the pattern is to be found. Pincelli Hull refers to spectrality as a signal of mass extinction: “The researchers note, that the modern ocean is full of ecological ‘ghosts’—species that are now so rare that they no longer fill the ecological roles they did previously, when they were more abundant. Species rarity itself, rather than extinction, can lead to a cascade of changes within ecosystems, long before the species goes extinct, the scientists explain.” Or: “The ecological ghosts of oceans past already swim in emptied seas.”27
Spectrality isn’t just an ineffectual aesthetic flicker on top of a mechanical bumping about of flavorless reality cakes. Spectrality is a very precise ontological category, not just a haze that makes anything metaphysical impossible.
Darwin argues that at every step of evolution there is mutation. Things don’t evolve teleologically. DNA mutation is random with respect to current need. We know this. But can we imagine it, as Shelley might say? What does it actually mean?
It means something quite amazing.
Stop the tape of evolution at any point and you will find a species, shadowed by some X-power. A fish that can leap out of water and survive for more than a few seconds by gulping air, let’s say. There seems to be no point to this flamboyant behavior. Some fish might find it disturbing, even insulting to fish-kind. Perhaps this fish is dangerous. Perhaps it needs to be confined or put on drugs for its own good; it might do itself harm. The fish is indeed dangerous: ontologically dangerous. Dangerous to the fish who think that they have “I am exactly this fish” inscribed all the way through every part of their structure.
Just in the same way as Irigaray talks about sexuality, a species isn’t one and it isn’t two.28 What is the case is a species shadowed by an X-species. Parrots and X-parrots. Men and X-men. Women and X-women. Live oaks and X–live oaks. Cyanobacteria and X-cyanobacteria, which have the special ability to live inside other single-celled organisms: these X-cyanobacteria are called chloroplasts and they are why plants are green and can photosynthesize. Likewise, some anaerobic bacteria hid in differently-evolving single celled organisms, and now you have them in every cell of your body. They are called mitochondria and they are why you are capable of reading this: they provide your energy. Your eyes are moving down this page because of a bacterial superpower.
You can’t be a lifeform unless you have this spectral double, this mutant shadow. Being alive means being supernatural.
A species is not an individual. I can subdivide it into its members, and there are future and past versions of it. But it’s not individual, in a much more profound, structural sense. Species is not individual because it can’t be counted as a “one”: a species is haunted by its X-species in order to exist at all. In this sense, a species is utterly unique—because this “one-plus-X” quality is ungraspable, because a mutation isn’t “for” anything, because it’s unpredictable in a strong sense. There is a vivid difference between being individual and being unique. Just ask a standard garden lawn, a classic American expression of individualism; and then consult a lawn covered in psychedelic crucifixes and “outsider” art, an expression of uniqueness that is often illegal.
This is the deep way in which the concept of humankind isn’t about putting beings into preformatted boxes at all. It’s not just that right now my human identity is scooped out by some future existence as a post-human being. All we are doing in that case is just replacing a metaphysics of separated self-identical humans with a metaphysics of a self-identical flow of matter or life, of which I and my mutated future version are just instances. The net effect on the problem of reifying species is nil.
What is in fact the case is that right now, at this very moment, my existence is always already shadowed by my X-existence, as a condition of possibility for my existing at all. It isn’t that frogs and humans and cyanobacteria are not really real, while some underlying flow of “life” is. There are frogs and they aren’t octopuses; they are irreducible. But there are only frogs on condition that every frog has, as its shadow, its X-frog doppelganger. The monotheistic concept of soul and body is a way of domesticating this spookiness, tying it down to a non-migrant hierarchical social structure. The soul sits nicely in the body, and it isn’t the body. The X-frog floats uneasily around the frog, and it is the frog—and it isn’t, at the same time. As Freud observes in his essay on the uncanny, the concept of soul is shadowed by the concept of specter.29 Ecological awareness is saturated with nothingness, a shimmering or flickering, a shadow play of presence and absence intertwined. What does this feel like from moment to moment?
Time isn’t like that either. Because of what I’ve just argued, time itself is not a line of reified atomic now-points, but a spooky shifting that haunts itself, slightly in front or behind itself, the rippling play of light and shadow in the pond water reflected on the underside of a sundial on a late summer afternoon, a vibrant stillness that is far from static. The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present “nowness,” a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist, a region that can’t be tied to a specific timescale.
Nowness is a dynamic relation between the past and the future. According to the spectral logic I’m outlining, the present isn’t present! It doesn’t exist, at least not like that. The belief that “animals” are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now. This is what is wrong with the second foot of Marx’s species-being, the foot in anthropocentrism. Furthermore, past and future are artifacts of the structure of entities as such, and are to be found nowhere outside of them. The form of a thing, its appearance, is the past. My face is a map of everything that happened to my face. A beehive is a story about what happened when some bees chewed some wax. There is a contextual abyss about appearance: we can’t draw the line decisively as to when the face stops and its explanatory context—all the things that happened to give it this exact appearance—begins. This provides the basis for the “nightmare” quality of past states of humankind that weigh on us: there might be no end to the “weight of dead traditions.”30
On the other hand, the essence of a thing, its being, is the future. Entities are not entirely caught like algorithms in the gravitational pull of the past. There is also levity: the lightness of futurality. The future is also an abyss. What will happen to my face next? I’m unsure, not just because it’s hard to predict at least somewhat far into the measureable future, but for the deeper reason that the measurable future depends on an infinite (uncountable) futurality, the withdrawal-quality of a thing, so that whatever access mode I use (thinking-about, dabbing-lotion-on, photographing-a-selfie-of), my face slips away like a liquid. The one place our ultra-utilitarian culture has cordoned off as a zone in which this kind of thing is barely tolerated is called art. But in truth, everything behaves like that. Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.
We will revisit this idea frequently: appearance is the past; being is the future; nowness is the relative motion of future over past, not touching. A thing is a junction of two abyssal movements. Solidarity is the noise the symbiotic real makes in its floating, spectral nowness, conditioned by the past (otherwise known as trauma), yet open to the future. Creativity and enjoyment are a “disabled,” malfunctioning relative motion between past and future, appearance and being.
X-existence happens in the symbiotic real because the ontological structure of a thing allows it. To exist is to X-exist. You can’t be counted as one. But you also can’t be counted as two. Your spectral double is your spectral double, not some frog’s. But it isn’t proper to you. It’s highly improper, in fact; it violates every notion of property and propriety. It’s indecent of fish to breathe air. The manifold of species and X-species is fractal; it lies somewhere between one and two, and the logic of this in-between area must be modal: it must violate strict versions of the Law of the Excluded Middle, so that things can be sort of true, kind of real, slightly wrong. It is as if every indicative sentence is shadowed by its subjunctive double, the sentence in “perhaps” mode. The sentence is open. It isn’t nothing, and it isn’t exactly something. Meaning as such is its spectral shadow. Who knows what a poem is really saying? But this poem is this poem, not that poem.
ACTING AND BEHAVING, FUTURE AND PAST
In a non-metaphysical, which is to say post-Kantian, sense, we cannot rely on a teleological concept of species-being, a definition of the human based on an anthropocentric metaphysics that distinguishes the human architect who acts from the bee that (and I suspect the neuter would be the preferred pronoun here) behaves. We need to peel away the second page of Marx’s description of species-being in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from the first page.
This is urgent, not superficial. If a bee only behaves, and if a bee is a worker, a robot (from the Czech term for “worker”), then the bee is already as if alienated in a capitalist structure, one which doesn’t even need human input, but which spreads throughout the symbiotic real, reified as Nature: “the way things are,” which is to say, how they predictably behave. This is capitalist realism applied to nonhumans. It’s a bug, not a feature, of Marxism. The bee is permanently caught in the past, because if it only executes an algorithm, it’s executing some past state of the bee genome. So, not only is Nature mechanical and reified (no matter how squishy and green it looks), Nature is also frozen in the past. But if human species-being, which is a part of the symbiotic real, is frozen in the past, there is no way for it to be creative. Workers, by implication, are caught forever in a naturalized capitalist state! It’s the past to the power of two, as a matter of fact, because the automated labor they perform must represent a past state of social requirements. I’m pretty sure this entrapment of workers in the past isn’t what Marx really wanted.
On the other hand, acting seems entirely futural. To act is to be like the capitalist, mastering time by projecting a future in which M will have transformed into M-prime. The absolute, I-can-do-anything-to-anything Kantian freedom of the capitalist is hardwired into this picture of human labor! Acting is imprisoned in the future, which means that any attempt to transform humankind’s enjoyment modes into communist modes will only be utopian, never arriving. And to work is to be a boss: only the capitalist really does it. I’m sure Marx didn’t mean that, either.
The sharp difference between “to act” and “to behave” expresses a class division that is structural to capitalism. And it expresses a severing of the nonhuman (the algorithmic, the past) from the human (the imaginative, the future). That, as they say, totally sucks.
It seems necessary to soften the edges between “act” and “behave” if we are going to create a communist theory of action. “To act” and “to behave” need to be seen as dual aspects of one being. They slide over one another, generating a spectral, breathing nowness. This nowness is open and so it is capable of novelty, or as Marx says, the poetry of the future.31 Nowness is the mode in which solidarity appears. It can’t be found in the past or in the future, but in the nowness of lifeforms in the symbiotic real. It is the default way in which the past (trauma) sliding underneath the future (openness) generates a relative motion that doesn’t have to be chosen, only appreciated.
When it becomes impossible to distinguish between behaving and acting, between executing an algorithm and being a person, we have entered a spectral realm. The notion of nonhumans as spectral is not cute or trivial. Indeed, spectrality could be thought as an index of reality or accuracy. How so? It has to do with the fact that ambiguity is a signal of accuracy.
When in the optician’s the doctor hones in on your prescription, you face an inevitable choice between two different kinds of lens, either of which might work, but because they are so subtly different from one another it’s hard to tell which one is better. The doctor asks, “Which one? Number one, or number two? Number one, or number two?” You might as well choose one or the other. The basic, irresolvable ambiguity that happens at that moment is a signal of the accuracy of the prescription. This is not how we normally like to think about ambiguity. We usually assume that ambiguity means that something is amiss. Here it means that given the physical constraints of the lenses and the constraints of your vision system, your ability to receive and interpret visual data, you are now seeing as well as you can. You won’t ever see absolutely perfectly, because physical systems are necessarily determinate and therefore limited. The spectral realm is a space not of indeterminacy: zombies are very different from vampires; chickens are different from lemurs. It is a realm of profound ambiguity, with many more variables than the ones you find in the optometrist’s chair.
The gap between the principle of (perfect) sight and the kind of sight you are achieving with the lenses becomes obvious, and so does something else. The gap between the two kinds of lens exists but you can hardly detect it. These two facts are deeply related. The lenses have been tuned to your vision. The space of attunement is a spectral realm that is “analog,” thick, not rigidly bounded, so that more than one choice becomes available. The floating of decision in this spectral attunement space is accurate. And highly determinate.
Now consider just one thing, such as a tiny object close to absolute zero in a vacuum. This thing also begins to display determinate ambiguity, making us aware of a spectral attunement space. There are certain quantum phenomena, where a weird overlap between two physical systems—called superposition—can occur. The two lenses are different, yet in another way they are the same. Just as how the most accurate data perception format that we have (quantum theory and the equipment we build to observe quantum states) shows that when a thing is very carefully scrutinized, for instance at near absolute zero in a vacuum, it starts to reveal its profound ambiguity, exhibiting phenomena such as superposition or what is called coherence. Because of the finitude of a physical system, you can’t hit absolute zero perfectly. But the system doesn’t need to be absolutely at zero kelvin. What seems to be static and firm starts to reveal its shifty qualities: the way in which it is smeared into itself, or vibrating and not-vibrating at the same time, or shimmering without being pushed in a mechanical way.
The thing starts to show that it is haunted—by itself. Humankind is not a unified lump of blandness; it is a flickering hauntedness. Humankind does exist, but in the X-existence way. Solidarity thus X-exists in this way: it is always X-solidarity, inclusive of 1+n beings, not just one (human beings). Solidarity implies nonhumans.
Nonmeaning is haunted by meaning; meaning is a ghost that arrives yet never arrives. We can’t find it at the end of the sentence—we can’t find it at the end of all the sentences. Yet, sentences depend on it. Meaning is a specter that haunts signification. Justice, as Plato demonstrated, can never be directly seen, only embodied in imperfect instances of itself. Justice haunts the impossibility of perfect justice in any one instance. Forgiveness is haunted by the idea of forgiving the unforgiveable, which would be the ultimate kind of forgiveness—and also impossible. All kinds of biological and physical categories—life, mind, sentience, consciousness, even existence as such X-exist. Mind can’t be reduced to matter, yet it can’t be reduced to non-matter either.
Acting haunts behavior such that when we get very close to these concepts, we can’t decide between them. Along with proving that bees can learn and teach other bees, that ants can hesitate, and that rats can experience regret, we can do something else, something cheaper in every sense. And more effective: endless proofs won’t satisfy someone who thinks that there is no ambiguity between acting and behaving. What we can do is wonder whether, at this moment, I myself am a person or an android. Without bringing in a supreme being as a referee—it would have to be a benevolent one, too—it is impossible to tell. This is the true genius of Descartes’ Meditations. Perhaps thinking that I imagine and act rather than simply execute algorithms is just the kind of thing that the android Tim Morton has been programmed to think.
Mind is neither inside nor outside the physical, inside nor outside my body. To exist is to be an uncanny doppelganger of oneself at the same time. Uncanny “inhuman” beings are not products of racism; they are the attempt to construct a “healthy human being” not haunted by its inhuman specter. It’s right to accuse Nazi animal rights and Hitler’s vegetarianism of being anthropocentric and indeed racist, based on an impossibly clean difference between the human and the nonhuman, enabled by exterminating the unhuman in social, psychic and philosophical space. Uncanny beings are not made uncanny. Being at all just is uncanny X-being. To feel solidarity is to feel haunted.
I DOUBT, THEREFORE I HAVE SOLIDARITY WITH YOU
Back to the optician’s. Your final choice of lens two instead of lens one can’t be perfect, if you think perfect means the one and only solution to your vision problem. Lens two will always be haunted by lens one. Lens two doesn’t exhaust the possibility of attuning to your vision system. It is not perfectly adequate to your vision, like a key fitting a lock, which means that we are now in a truth domain that radically departs from the habit-forming medieval Neoplatonic monotheist concept of truth as adequation.32
It’s also not the case that the lens is haunted by something like potentiality, another favorite way of domesticating the weirdness of actual physical things. According to this view, adopted by Agamben in a reading of Aristotle, potentiality is the openness in which all kinds of things could happen, while actuality is when this openness closes up.33 But in the view I’m exploring here, there is a perfect overlap between potential and actual. What I’m saying here is that the actual lens is open, spectral, ambiguous, as a condition of possibility for its being a good-enough lens (and good-enough is as good as it gets). Spectrality, the way a thing keeps exceeding itself, or is displaced from itself, or is ecstatically outside itself (ekstasis, “ex-sistence”), doesn’t just belong to human being, as Heidegger thought. Humankind is flickering, displaced from itself, ec-static, rippling and dappled with shadows. Shadows made not only by some other entity interacting with it, like the sun through the trees, but shadows that are an intrinsic part of the thing. When the lens is close enough to being “right,” it starts to be haunted by the other lens, as if the other were so similar as to be uncannily the same lens. What stands outside the human is species-being as such, so that the ecstatic quality of Dasein is in fact non-anthropocentric, not to mention non-German and non-Nazi.
There is no need to distill the possibility of the possibility of the possibility of solidarity from some kind of void potential, in the way Agamben would proceed. The magical specter is right here.
Personal identity needs an upgrade to imagine the identity of species-being outside of a teleological metaphysics of presence and a toxic, overkill survival mode. Imagine an extremely accurate zombie or android version of yourself: the uncanny would consist in how impossible it would be to maintain that you were yourself anymore, exclusively and alone. “You” might as well be the android version! Your self-concept—I am me, here, and usually we emphasize this even more by thinking, I am a gas or liquid contained “in” this body here—evaporates. Uncanniness, paranoia and ambiguity are indices of reality, not of unreality.
One surprising conclusion we can draw now is that paranoia is a possibility condition for empathy. It’s counterintuitive, but we can only conclude that empathy becomes distorted when it assumes that there is a definite person over there with definite shoes I can definitely walk in. What empathy requires is the energy of solidarity, vibrating away in the basement—I join with you even though I can’t check in advance whether there is a you there. More and more and more detailed uncertainty as to the ontological status of a being looks and quacks like love. Empathy might involve a reification that is amplified in fully condescending sympathy, with its intrinsic power relationship. I am to decide whether or not to give you a coin as you beg on the street corner. Paranoia is co-emergent. It could go either way, toward reification when I try to reduce the paranoia, or toward solidarity when I don’t.
This is problematic when it comes to sentient nonhumans, and more so when it comes to those nonhumans genetically closest to the human—not to mention the human as such. As one approaches the human, hardwired reductionism (cognitive, ethical, ontological) takes over: paranoia encourages us to reify. Theoretical physicists, with their heads in black holes and fermions, are the best defenders of the humanities for this reason, whereas neuroscientists, with their heads in our heads, do not have such a great track record:
We can’t ask a creature to [talk to] us, but we can observe behavior, ask sensible questions, create some good experiments, and come to a better understanding. Einstein did this with physics. Darwin with the tree of life. Galileo didn’t complain … that the planets wouldn’t talk to him … Yet because we cannot converse with other animals, animal behaviorists throw up their hands, saying we can’t know if they think or feel, and we should assume they cannot.34
Confused by the rigid strong correlationism of the linguistic turn, many humanities scholars don’t prevent this slide toward the most default support of the human–nonhuman boundary. The idea that the (human) subject or history or economic relations is the Decider and that the correlatee is a blank screen forecloses the paranoia. Think about emotion. We observe some emotions in nonhumans such as elephants, but we are less willing to let elephants feel emotions that seem less useful to us. We can let elephants be hungry when they look hungry, but we have trouble allowing that they are happy when they look happy.35 That, for some reason, would be anthropomorphic and therefore bad. (What if worrying about anthropomorphism were itself a perfect example of human behavior, namely … anthropomorphism?)
It’s interesting that we think sheer survival (hence hunger) is more “real” than a quality of existing, such as being happy. Just surviving, hunger, are supposedly “real” conditions, by which we mean nothing to do with being human in particular. Ecological catastrophe has been wrought in the name of this survival, sheer existence without heed to any quality of existence. This default utilitarianism has been very harmful to us, let alone to other life-forms. We think that what’s good about it is that sheer survival is above and beyond our existence as humans! That bottom line statement says it all.
The division between “substantial” and “superficial” underwrites the difference between reality and appearance in the Twittersphere of truthiness, the spectral space in which truth and falsehood happen.36 We believe sheer behavior to be on the side of reality—it’s what we can observe empirically—whereas action is a mysterious aspect of how just one entity behaves (note the paradox). The metaphysical, onto-theological freight couldn’t be easier to identify. Despite the lack of empirical verifiability, we are able to point to (human) action in the empirical realm, and we refrain abstemiously from anything like even wanting to point to action when it comes to nonhumans. But there is no reason for this division.
Normally, at this point in the argument, philosophy might reduce human acting to sheer behavior. This would reduce the paranoia, which wouldn’t be good. But it’s also very problematic, because if I’m just behaving when I reduce action like that, how can I check that what I’m doing is correct? I’m going to go the other way around. This doesn’t mean granting nonhumans the ability to act. I’m interested in working away at that arbitrary division.
Utility is hugely overrated as a driver of lifeforms and of evolution. Sexual display is ridiculously expensive from DNA’s point of view. Why even evolve it? It must be because of the way things are: reality isn’t actually something bland “underneath” appearances, so that utility isn’t something bland underneath more “pointless” goals. This distinction very much has to do with the profound ambiguity between acting and behaving. For Kant, a work of art behaves as if it is acting … rather like us. This ambiguity is a way to know that there is a gap between being and appearing that we can’t point to—it’s transcendental.
Kant argues that we know that there is a reality not because we can point to it or smack it or see it directly—that kind of validation can only be backed up by threats of violence, because it involves metaphysical beliefs—but because we are able to have a profoundly ambiguous, non-ego experience he calls beauty. Beauty is a spectral being that haunts me in my “inner” space, or rather, makes me aware that I am not “inside” something at all, but strangely blended with what I’m seeing “over there,” so that I can’t tell whose fault the beauty experience is, mine or the painting’s. Trying to locate the experience either “over here” or “over there” results in ruining it. If you think it’s a certain feature of the Mona Lisa, say the smile, then a thousand photocopies of the smile should be a thousand times more beautiful than the actual experience you are having with it. But this can’t be true. Or, if you think it’s a certain feature of your response that you can locate, for example in your brain, for instance a certain neurotransmitter, then a thousand pills consisting of that neurotransmitter’s active ingredient should in turn create an experience a thousand times more beautiful. But it won’t. It will kill you.
Beauty is a strange experience because in it I get a feel for something I can’t feel, or as Keats put it, “the feel of not to feel it.”37 I can’t grasp the beauty experience without ruining it, so I need to leave it alone in its deep ambiguity, an ambiguity I often experience as a floating sadness without anything in particular to be sad about. “Sadness” here is happiness without a concept: “Sad is happy for deep people.”38 Sadness here does not have an object in particular: we aren’t talking about melancholia, which is the trace of lost objects. Sadness is precisely without objectification, a spectral floating pleasure that cannot attach to an object because it is incapable of reification. It haunts me to the extent that it isn’t cooked up by my ego, yet it is happening in my experiential space. It is part of me, yet it isn’t. Sadness is beauty in all its spectral strangeness.
BEAUTY IS HAUNTED
How come I can have an experience that is beyond my ego? Because I’m not completely me! I’m full of holes because I am like everything else, a living, breathing malfunction made up of all kinds of things that aren’t me, that misbehave constantly. Such an experience beyond ego is an incontrovertible refutation of solipsism without need for further empirical validation, because even if the universe is only me, there are two of me. Or there is just me and my hallucination, a being that isn’t me. Moreover, the other me pesters me all the time, so I don’t get a moment’s peace. I am shimmering. Furthermore, I can’t decide whether this really is me, or the effect of some other being. Beauty means being haunted by another entity, which might or might not be me, but this is radically undecidable.
At a more fundamental level yet, and a more bizarre one, the spectrality of a table that can move by itself without mechanical input—and its implication in the world of the paranormal—is precisely at issue. Metaphors can get away from their creators; like dancing tables they can misbehave and slip out a truth that the author didn’t intend. If Marx is saying that a dancing table is necessarily absurd, such that a computing table (one that evolves notions out of its wooden brain) is even more absurd, then Marx is cleaving implicitly to a substance ontology in which appearing is separated from being, and in which subject is separated from object, and in which there is a logic that allows for no contradictions and no excluded middles. This is unfortunate because Marx himself argues that capitalism promulgates a substance ontology, borrowing an argument from Aristotle. Aristotle says of the concept of matter that it’s like searching through a zoo to find the “animal” rather than the various species such as monkeys and mynah birds.39 What Aristotle says about matter, Marx says about capital.
Things can’t move by themselves because this would violate the Law of Noncontradiction. The mover of the table must be moved mechanically, not by itself or telekinetically. The spectacle of its movement must be a false appearance. But this would be to accept the non-strangeness of the computing table that evolves notions out of its wooden brain. The table can appear to think. The thinking table confronts us with the paranoia of artificial intelligence: we can never prove if it’s a person or not.
But if the dancing table isn’t really dancing, it means that the table isn’t really thinking. This would mean that commodity fetishism doesn’t function at all—but this can’t be correct! The reduction of strangeness abolishes the idea of commodity fetishism. Marx here appears to have a foot in the world of solidarity with nonhumans. The friendly comedy with which he talks about such things as tables and coats might also indicate this. Marx almost accepts tables that dance by themselves or that are moved by telekinesis.
Since the ambiguity between acting and behaving is part of a larger ambiguity between being alive and not being alive, to embrace the specter of the nonhuman fully is to embrace the specter of anything at all being “alive” in the sense of moving without mechanical input. If this is true, it eats away at the biocentric and biopolitical notion of Life as opposed to non-life. Furthermore, to embrace these specters is to embrace spectrality, which is to say, the way in which appearing and being are impossible to separate in such a way that a basic ontological ambiguity is a possibility condition for existence as such.
What is ideological is that the dancing table is strapped down and forced to compute (human) values. Assuming that the table is an unformatted surface, that it’s only what it is when (human) economic relations format it—either because it’s unformed matter or because it’s a blank screen for human desire—is part and parcel of reification, and the reason why capitalism works. If communism is going to transcend capitalism, it has to transcend this anthropocentric, “overmining” mode; otherwise it becomes only a variant of the logistics that gave rise to capitalism in the first place.
Marxism doesn’t work and therefore will not survive without including nonhuman beings in its construction. Moreover, including nonhuman beings implies also including spectrality. And this means tables can dance. And this means the distinction between “lifeform” and “table” breaks down in some sense.
PERFORATED WORLDS
Let’s return to the concept of world. World is a profoundly Heideggerian concept—it has to do with how Dasein co-creates or correlates or Decides on reality (whichever term you prefer). For Heidegger, humans are the ones with a full world: world is a process, worlding, and humans are the worlding beings. And German humans are the best at worlding.
Heidegger’s Nazism is more than unfortunate, and it’s a shame that the reaction to him is so often blanket condemnation, while at the same time using his terminology, or generating concepts within his thought region, concepts that have “–ality” and “–icity” suffixes.
But the good news is that like Marx’s anthropocentrism, Heidegger’s Nazism is a bug, not a feature. The metaphysics of presence that allows one to point to Germans as the best world-ers is in fact illegal within Heidegger’s thought. Furthermore, the notion of world only works if we allow nonhumans to have it. Heidegger says that “animals” are ‘‘poor in world’’ (Weltarm) and inanimate beings such as stones have no world at all. But in truth, not only can we allow cats to have a world, but even waterfalls. We can do this because world is very cheap. We don’t have to raise cats and waterfalls up to human status to do so, and this is great for another reason. If world is a prize for being special, the trajectory within the concept is inevitably toward Nazism. But if instead world is an incredibly cheap thing that worms can have, it’s not that worms can be Nazis, but that Nazis are just very confused, puffed-up worms.
Why is world cheap? Because world is inherently lacking, inherently ragged and faulty. World is perforated. There are not perfect, smoothly functioning worlds, and poor people’s versions. To have a world intrinsically is to be Weltarm.40 World is only ever something you can be poor in, not because you didn’t get to enjoy it as much as an SS officer, but because world as such is poverty. World is structurally, irreducibly perforated:
I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
(The Beatles, “A Day in the Life”)41
This is also marvelous in another way: if there is no such thing as a full world, there is no such thing as no world at all. So even waterfalls have worlds! World is cheap enough for everything to have it. In this reality, there is not (full) world or no world at all; there is a range of overlapping worlds.
This cheapness saves us from the popular cul-de-sac of world as a normative concept. We sometimes hear that worlding is a special property of lifeforms, and held up as a reason to care for those lifeforms. To some extent, it is. World doesn’t depend on consciousness. It’s not about knowing that there is a world. It’s about getting on with stuff, going about your doggy, or spidery, or whaley business. But “saving the world” doesn’t mean preserving a world. There is a world of precarious, cheap labor, of massively underpaid, overexploited workers in electronics factories in China. Does that mean that these factories should be protected or cared for?
The cheapness of world also saves us from the blanket condemnation of world.42 Of course world doesn’t make sense as a metaphysically present entity you can point to; it never did. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist at all. It just means that your idea of “exist” needs an upgrade, an upgrade that deconstruction (Heidegger, Derrida) makes readily available. The end of the world is the end of a normative, white Western world that takes itself to be coherent and smooth and top.
Heidegger argues that what he calls worldview is bad because it is reified and solid. But his opposing concept of world is also solid, and it malfunctions in his thought because of this fake perfection. Because of ecological awareness, you are experiencing your world as malfunctioning, as broken, precisely insofar as all kinds of things are sticking out of the normalized background we take to be our world, which most often is deeply anthropocentrically scaled. All kinds of unexpected things are emerging from melting Arctic ice: methane, Cold War bases … things trapped deep, and thoughts and assumptions trapped deep in our unconscious minds, too.
But through this malfunctioning one comes to realize something deep. The notion of (smooth, complete) world as such is also broken. There is no way to put it back together, because the very concept of smooth functioning, just happening without things sticking out, is anthropocentrically scaled. Worlds are not like that. This means that we have transformed our idea of world. World precisely is this tattered, perforated patchwork quilt that doesn’t quite start and stop with a definite horizon—temporal as well as spatial horizons are equally full of holes and blurry, by the way.
In turn this means we can share worlds. Our human world is shared with all kinds of other tattered, broken worlds. The world of spiders, the world of tigers, the world of bacteria. Wittgenstein was wrong: we can understand lions—at least to some extent. This isn’t because we condescendingly expand our world, but because our world is perforated—we don’t quite understand ourselves, either. We can understand tigers and ourselves modally: we can share worlds 20 percent, or 60 percent. Sharing doesn’t have to be all or nothing. World sharing requires regular violations of the Law of the Excluded Middle.
We just upgraded, or rather downgraded, world to a manifold that is intrinsically inviting to nonhuman beings. This is better than giving up on world altogether, and asserting that there is no world at all—that is also anthropocentric. It’s like saying that since I can’t play with this soccer ball, no one else is allowed to play with it either. Perforated worlds can overlap. This cat isn’t a guest in my house; it’s a member of the family, which isn’t really my family, and I can think this not by elevating the cat into some special condescendingly bestowed status, but by noticing that my perforated world intersects with his. By noticing that family is also a symbiotic relationship that is uneasy and contingent, not a solid world with a smooth boundary. We are both guests of each other, guests of the house, and the house is a guest of ourselves.
The world concept is in the form of a form of verb, worlding, because it’s best thought as the emergent property of an algorithmic process. You get on with things, and your world emerges from this getting on. You cook, go to the shops, kiss your boyfriend, start a reading group, break your toe and hobble to the hospital, quit your job, go on a march. That’s your world. We have a tendency to think that world is solid and rigid and perfect because of the algorithm of agrilogistics functioning in the background of social space.
World is always spectral. World is the noise your behavior makes. World has a virtual, modal quality about it that you can’t delete. Worlds are partial objects, like everything else. They are more than the wholes of which they are parts. There are many, many worlds in the biosphere, and these worlds are not just components of the biosphere, in the same way that the family isn’t my family in particular.
Worlds are functions of algorithms, and algorithms can be more or less detailed and include many or few instructions and involve more or fewer beings. This means that the logic that describes worlds must be modal, a matter of more and less rather than existing or not-existing. A very complex recipe for an intricate dessert might create a rather elaborate world, whereas a stone resting at the bottom of a pond might not. A Palestinian hurling a stone at a police officer might be part of a very complex world indeed, emerging from an algorithm containing a lot of steps and confusing lines of code. But Palestinians and stones and dessert chefs can all share their worlds, or not, because their worlds are intrinsically perforated. We can talk to a lion, and we can listen to a lion. Cats have figured out how to talk with humans—in our company they develop a whole range of miaows. And isn’t this evidence of how language as such isn’t an exclusively human thing, and that human language itself can contain nonhuman terms? Cats don’t magically learn to speak human. It’s that humans use nonhuman words, because language is much less exclusive and special than we like to think—because worlds are intrinsically perforated. Miaow, like a car indicator light or an address on an envelope, has meaning and relevance because it’s part of a set of interacting projects. Miaow relates to breasts and milk. Human babies are just like cats: they learn to vocalize a sound that connects the mother’s breast to their lips.
Consciousness, language, world: it’s not that there’s no such thing as these entities. It’s that they are so much cheaper than we reckoned they were. Nagel and Wittgenstein claim we can’t identify at all with the worlds of bats and lions. But can we identify with human worlds?43 Can we even identify with our own worlds? What does identify mean, if identity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in the first place? Of course we can share the world of a lion, and she or he can share ours.
MODAL BEINGS
Georg Cantor showed that there is a gap between numbers and sets of numbers. Likewise, there is a gap between lifeforms and sets of lifeforms. We can think of these sets as ecosystems, biomes, biospheres—we can think of these sets at any scale, and there is no easy continuity between these sets. An environment just is a certain set of lifeforms. The way one does ecological research is to establish a somewhat arbitrary set: to define a boundary sometimes called a mesocosm, in which one observes lifeforms coming and going, reproducing, struggling.
An ecosystem is vague, in the sense that sorites paradoxes arise when one attempts to define them precisely. How many blades of grass do I have to remove for this meadow not to be a meadow? One—surely not. Two—still a meadow. Three, four, and so on—and the same logic applies until I have only one blade of grass left. I conclude, wrongly, that there is no meadow. These paradoxes plague sets of lifeforms at any scale, and therefore it’s strictly impossible to think ecological reality via a metaphysics of presence, namely, a belief that to be a thing, you have to be constantly present.
Sorites paradoxes exist everywhere in ecological thought, because ecological beings are heaps: ecosystems, boundaries between geological eras, lifeforms … We’ll see how necessary it is to believe they exist as we proceed. To believe in them, we need a logic that allows them to exist.
It’s much better to think that there is a meadow and there is not a meadow at the same time. We will violate the supposed Law of Noncontradiction, but it wasn’t that great for lifeforms anyway. There is a meadow, but we can’t point to it directly, because it’s not constantly present. And yet here is the meadow, with the butterflies, the cowslips, the voles. Just as a vole is a set of things that are not voles, so the meadow is a set of things such as voles that are not meadows. A meadow is an implosive whole made of partial objects.
Thus, a spectral strangeness that haunts being applies not only to lifeforms—a vole is a not-vole—but also to meadows, ecosystems, biomes and the biosphere. The haunting, ungraspable yet vivid spectrality of things also means that there can be sets of things that are not strictly members of those sets, violating Russell’s prohibition on the set paradox that arises through thinking Cantor’s transfinite sets. Transfinite sets are sets of numbers that contain sets of numbers that are not strictly members of that set. There is an irreducible gap between the set of real numbers and the set of rational numbers—Cantor and Gödel drove themselves crazy trying to find a smooth continuum between the two.
The idea that there is a soul or even a mind that is “in” a body like a gas in a bottle is an attempt to contain and reduce the spectrality. But this reification is a mistake. The mistake people are making here is to onticize spectrality, to make the specter something you can point to “here” and “at this time,” whereas the specter is an ontological aspect of the structure of how things are. The spectrality of a thing is more like a medical syndrome, a chronic symptom that’s hard to detect, and less like a point on a map. An object and its uncanny spectral halo form an objectitis. We can generate another meaning for the word “dance” in Capital: a dancing table is simply a regular old table, but one to which we have restored the spectrality so that there is a dance between the table and its spectral halo, like “ghosting” on VHS tape.
So many specters, so little time. Anarchism is the specter of Marxism and some of its spectrality must be let back in to allow Marxism to breathe in an environment in which it accommodates nonhumans. And consumerism is the specter of environmentalism, such that the future enhancement and multiplication of pleasure modes implied in ecological awareness and ecological social policy draws on and amplifies phenomenological chemicals manufactured in the heart of the enemy of vanilla environmentalisms.
To repeat: Marxism doesn’t work and therefore will not survive without including nonhuman beings. And including nonhuman beings implies also including spectrality. And this means tables can dance. And this means the distinction between “lifeform” and “table” breaks down in some sense. Marxism only works if it weirdly embraces animism. Is saying this appropriating First Peoples’ culture? I understand the concern, but as I pointed out in the introduction, the philosophical source of this anxiety is a strong correlationism that underwrites imperialism, especially in its early phase. The British were only too happy to draw sharp lines of cultural difference between themselves and the subjugated people whose habits “just aren’t cricket.”
THE SPACE OF SPECTRAL POLITICS
Biopolitics involves the demarcation, classification and control of beings according to concepts of life. It has created a control society whose zero-level structure is that of the death camp. What comes after biopolitics? The politics of undeath. It must, because relying on what comes before biopolitics has to do with subjects and objects, which has to do with souls and bodies, which is precisely a resistance to the spectral. Subjects and objects depend on proprietary notions of selfhood, in which I am I because I am in possession of myself.
We could joke that including nonhumans in this setup is both difficult and impossible. Difficult, because extending the self-concept to include nonhumans is highly onerous and fraught with paradoxes. Prove that I myself as a human have a self-concept. Waiting for a human to allow a chimp to have a self-concept so that the chimp can be liberated from what is now taken to be its prison (a zoo) might well mean that the chimp dies before a verdict can be reached.44 Impossible, because if everything has rights, then nothing has rights, because rights depend on possessing things, and if nothing can be a possession, then nothing can have rights.
What comes next is not an expansion of rights, but an attunement of solidarity, to varying degrees of sharpness and amplitude. Spectral space is highly differentiated. It is nothing to do with life as survival. Yet it is not in the service of a one-size-fits-all life-as-abundance. It isn’t so easy to tell between a ghost and a person, between a person and an algorithm, between intelligence and computation, between number and counting. They each entail the other. And yet there is a very sharp difference at the same time. Much Western philosophy tries to contain the ghostly oscillation between these categories by policing the difference or by making it ontic—something you can point to. This is how racism and speciesism work. Racism says that the essence of the human can be pointed out in ontic space-time. Speciesism says the same in a different key. This pointing can’t happen. But a human is not a rabbit.
In the previous chapter, I pointed out that capitalism is a machine for producing in social space the object as imagined by default Western ontology: a bland lump of extension decorated with accidents. Alienating my specific, sensuous labor, homogenous abstract labor time is like a soul that capitalism forces into my body, making me into a Cartesian or Aristotelian zombie, a tool with a soul. In a way, capitalism strips the spectrality from things and forces properly behaved souls down their throats instead. This full-bodied yet totally bland abstraction is what is left of creativity and creations. How I’m molding this chocolate doesn’t exhaust me, or the chocolate, or the mold: there are other possibilities. Withdrawal—the fact that no access mode can exhaust a thing—bestows upon things their flickering, spectral quality. Capitalism tries to eliminate withdrawal, as if it could be wiped away; the fact that nothing can eliminate this ontological feature is why capitalism is violent.
Communism is spectral insofar as enjoyment and creation modes don’t need to be exhausted by the social format of economic system requirements. In particular, my production doesn’t have to be “for me,” but can be aimed toward a future in which I don’t exist, or a part of the biosphere where I don’t exist, or exist less. Production can be “useless,” insofar as it doesn’t serve my ego or the ego of a particular economic mode. All the different ways I can handle chocolate, and the ways chocolate can handle me, and the ways other beings can handle chocolate, are irrelevant to this specific state of how capital extracts this specific value at this specific historical moment. In a while, the hoover will move on to extract value differently. It doesn’t even care about the specifics of how it’s hoovering right now.
Humankind is a thing, and so it withholds its graspability, it is open. Humankind is humankind, not some abstract being but a very specific one. Yet this doesn’t mean we can point to it directly. Humankind is specific and spectral. The quality of humankindness floats spectrally like a halo around humans, precisely because of the specificity. The logic here is subtractive. We can say less about beings than we thought, and this is what makes them sensual, not some fullness of presence. They aren’t fully present, so there is less of them around to point to. Capitalism tries to bring them to full presence in the commodity format, but this presence isn’t luscious, it’s bland and merely extensional. Lusciousness is found in less than presence.
If humankind is less than Life, and less than being a special life-form, and less even than being a lifeform at all, then we need to explain something. What is this “less than”?