How does it feel to be human now? To be a human interpellated by this event of the Anthropocene? With its slow violence (Rob Nixon), it’sweird hyperobjects (Timothy Morton), it’s coming barbarism (Isabelle Stengers), where dystopias become doxa, where there is, as Günther Anders put it when confronting the nuclear age: an absence of the future? It is hard enough to know how to feel when someone dies, let alone when a world dies.
The thing about the Anthropocene is that “although it began with us, it will end without us…” (5) To even think it is to find oneself in a space of myth as well as science. “The semiotic regime of myth, perfectly indifferent to the empirical truth or falsity of its contents, comes into play whenever the relation between humans as such and the most general conditions of existence imposes itself as a problem for reason.” (6)
A cannibal metaphysics might come in handy now. If Amerindian myths are also a philosophy, then occidental philosophy might also have the structures and genesis of myths. Even if those myths are passing: “Intriguingly enough, everything takes place as if, of the three great transcendental ideas identified by Kant — God, Soul and World, respectively the objects of theology, psychology, and cosmology — we are now watching the downfall of the last.” (9)
In the Anthropocene, humans move from a biological to a geological agent. As such, it’s the collapse of a supposedly foundational distinction between the cosmological and the anthropological that might found the myth we call modernity, with its bifurcated and stratified order of the human versus the world. The thought of the end of a world poses a problem of the beginnings of both world and thought. How are world and thought correlated? The terms in play here beg for a semiotic square on which to arrange them.
The myth of Eden is as world before humans that is a world for humans, a world that is providential. Eden persists in the modern idea of wilderness. The word used to mean a barren place, but became sublime. Wilderness became a positive version of the world without humans for an environmentalism that thinks of humans as external to it and denaturing. Interestingly, in the myth of the Garden of Eden it is surrounded by wilderness in the old sense, but for the moderns the two become the same.
If Eden is a world before the human, there’s also a world after it, perhaps best known from the novel The Earth Abides by George Stewart, or the nonfiction book The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. There’s also versions of the human after the world, as having lost its world — the spiritual crisis of the moderns, who lost their God and their dwelling-place. Then there’s the modern who does not lose but abolishes the world by Promethean conquest. The world is made over as human, clear-felled by labor or industry, producing Heidegger’s metaphysical clearing. “For all its openness, the Clearing cannot but project an inverted image of its external double, the vast, ferocious wilderness surrounding the Garden of Eden.” (29)
It is strange how the social construction of reality became in reality the capitalist destruction of the planet. “Especially in its post-Romantic phase, first with the various existentialisms and, later, with post-modern constructionisms, the rift between subject and world becomes… an absolute ontological incommensurability that expresses itself in two complimentary mythical figures: that of the world’s disappearance, absorbed by the Subject and transformed into his Object (a social construction, a projection of language, a phantasm of desire); but also that of the Subject’s disappearance, absorbed by the world and made a thing among things, an organic contraption assembled by a blind watchmaker. The crisis of what would come to be known as correlationism effectively began long before the name was coined.” (29)
Against the world of worldless people, Quentin Meillassoux proposes the (conceptual) erasure of the human from the world. Meillassoux’s world is without a subject, dead, “glacial.” It is like Kant in reverse, in that with Kant, losing the dogmatic world of metaphysical philosophy meant turning inwards, to a marking-out of the limits of the subject. After Kant, there would be no world other than via the internality of the subject, leading to the loss of the great outdoors. But the detour through the subject gives license to theological temptations. For Meillassoux, the erasure of subject is an erasure of the temptation of the divine.
If for Meillassoux the world without a subject is without order, a hyper-chaos, for Ray Brassier (following Nick Land) it is fundamentally dead, always and already dead. His is a radical disenchantment of the world, thought from the perspective of extinction. The death drive becomes a cosmological principle. The way to affirm being is to deny life and sentience.
Here de Castro and Danowski would rather follow Steven Shaviro, whose solution is quite the reverse: the world is not only alive but sentient. For Shaviro, Meillassoux and Brassier’s assumption that matter is passive, inert, dead, insentient, indifferent, chaotic only re-introduces human exceptionalism in negative, resulting in “a curious negative idealism, a weird cadaverous subjectalism.” (35) It’s donut anthropocentrism, empty at the core.
de Castro and Danowski question the timing of this. Why this quandrant of the mythic universe of western thought, now that the Anthropocene cannot be denied? “The anti-correlationism of Meillassoux and other materialist metaphysicians of his generation therefore sounds, probably against their explicit intentions, as a pathetic cry of protest, if not a magical formula of exorcism or disavowal, against the forebodingly realizing power of thought, at least in our humble terrestrial abode.” (36)
If there is a world without us, then there is also an us without a world. It is perhaps what movies like Mad Max: Fury Road are about, or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which elsewhere I have described as a negative passion play. A more Promethean version (found much earlier in JD Bernal) is now called the singularity, in which worldless humans, overcome species-being and worldly limits: “We will no longer be accountable to the world.” (47) Everything will be human, or at least Californian.
A variant of this is ecomodernism, with its promise of a good Anthropocene. (Good for who?) It is basically business as usual, and nature once again as providence. Curiously, we are to have no more resentments, but to feel instead a gratitude to the world. It is, as de Castro and Danowsk wryly note, a “marriage of Nietzsche and Pollyanna.” (48) If there is not world enough for the commodity, then the production of commodities must continue beyond the world. Capital is to be re-enchanted as a magical agent.The left wing variant is accelerationism. “The accelerationists basic intuition is that a certain world, which has already ended, must finish ending, that is, fully actualize its inexistence.” (51) It looks forward to the full subsumption of nature into second nature, and then “the only way to conjure an Outside is to produce it from inside by driving the capitalist machine into overdrive…” (51) If the right wing version wants to re-enchant capital; the left wing version wants to believe again in the state.
“Accelerationists believe that ‘we’ must choose between the animal that we were and the machine that we shall be. In their materialist angelology, what they propose is, in short, a world without us, but made by us. Reciprocally, they imagine a post-human species re-created by a hyper-capitalist ‘material platform’ — but without capitalists. A nature denatured by un-man. A materialism, at long last (!), spiritualized.” (57) Its Hegel for cyborgs. Labor spiritualizes the world. The becoming human of the world is the becoming worldly of the human.
Thus we have so far three quadrants of a semiotic square. The first is the world before humans: Eden (a world for humans); Meillassoux world that is indifferent to us. The second is the world after humans: Brassier’s extinction, The World Without Us, environmentalists who want to restore some wilderness-Eden somewhere. The third is humans after the world: as excluded from it, in existentialism, or living on badly after it (Mad Max, The Road), or living well after it: the ecomodernism (right version), accelerationism (left version). Here too is the Hegelian dream of a future overcoming of the difference.
The quadrant unexplored in this taxonomy might be that of the human as preceding the world. Rather than subtract the human from correlation with the world, subtract the world — but at the beginning. The Amerindian myths Viveiros anatomized in Cannibal Metaphysics can now take its place in a larger schema. As we saw, various subsets of the human changed into other species, or into things. The part that did not change remained human. If in the west one is inclined to think of humans as the future and animals as the past, here is the reverse: A structure for thought that rather does away with attempts to find what is special in a human development out of the animal, but it language, labor, law, desire, culture, history, or a future.
There might be a corresponding Amerindian concept of time, a non-modern one lacking modernity’s distinctive, non-transitive quality, opening on to an ethnographic present rather than an historical present. This present epoch began when humans ceased becoming-other, ending a mythic, virtual time of transformations. A worldless humanity gives way to a world peopled by multiple peoples. The human is the active principle at the origin of a diverse world. It is a sort of inverse Garden of Eden. Humans came first. Nature separates itself from culture. Amerindian myth is not one with an “environment” that is external to the social. Rather, there are multiple forms of the social, populated by different species, each of which appears to its own kind as human. Every encounter with another species is war and diplomacy, embedded in a cosmopolitics.
McKenzie Wark, “Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: In and Against the Human,” Verso (x)
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