Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 2: Chapters 1-2

Cover design by Charlotte Daniels
(Bloomsbury, 2020)

IV.

As Poly Styrene once said: Identity / Is the crisis, can't you see?

And it remains so, even in a world that likes to pretend to be posthuman and fantasises about becoming transhuman. So MacCormack is probably right to start with this question as it whirlpools within contemporary politics and to argue: "It is time for humans to stop being human. All of them." [65]

But that's easier said than done; you can't tell someone who has the flu to just get over it and neither can we just shake off our humanity. What's more, the demand is controversial because there are many who are still waiting for their humanity to be fully recognised and are keen to assert themselves as subjects. As MacCormack notes:

"Identity politics has long been critical of posthuman philosophy's forsaking of identity for metamorphic becomings and transformative post-subjectivity, while posthuman philosophy's many critiques of identity [...] still struggles with how to acknowledge dark histories of oppression without perpetuating the identities to which they were victims." [36]

This conflict, between those who champion identity politics and those who subscribe to poststructuralist philosophy, is a dilemma alright. Though MacCormack claims it's actually a false conflict and to see "no impasse at all" [36]. For we can all move forward (into darkness) and ahumanity as long as we all agree to abandon our anthropocentric conceit and exit the phallo-carnivorous realm of the malzoan. And look! Here's Sistah Vegan to show us the way ...

Ultimately, MacCormack doesn't care about "arguments humans have between themselves" [51] over identity, social justice, or even animal rights; she cares about the "reduction in individual consumption of the nonhuman dead" [51]. If she retains a notion of equality, for example, she acknowledges that it is "as much of a myth as the humanist transcendental subject" [51].   

But better even this myth of equality than structured inequality; hierarchy is always a life-denying form of categorisation that restricts freedom and the potential of the individual to develop. Having said that, MacCormack is contemptuous of the idea that inanimate and inorganic objects might also be accorded a degree of agency; "a tedious inclination in certain areas of posthuman philosophy, where a chair is no different to a cow or a human" [56].

Now, I'm no objected-oriented ontologist, but I'm pretty sure that's an unfair characterisation of their work. Contrary to what MacCormack says, I think those working in this area argue not that all objects are equal, but that they are all equally objects upon a flat ontological field, or what Levi Bryant terms a democracy of objects.

And, as a Nietzschean, I'm very tempted to remind Patricia that being alive is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead and that to discriminate between living beings (cows) and inanimate objects (chairs) is, therefore, a form of prejudice. She'll betray her species (particularly the white male members of such) for the sake of all other organisms, but she'll not go to the wall for objects.

And I can't help seeing that as the point at which her moral vitalism triumphs over her own model of queerness; triumphs over and, indeed, infiltrates: "Queer in my use is [...] about the death of the human in order for the liberation of all life ..." [60] That's one definition, I suppose. And, in as much as queer means rare and unusual, then yes, life is queer - but that surely then includes human life; hasn't she heard that there's nowt so queer as folk?

MacCormack closes her opening chapter with a rather lovely paean to the philosopher and their vulnerability, which, she says, is as crucial as care of the world in its fragility is central to philosophical activism and creativity. The philosopher is also defined by their ever-changing and becoming-other:

"Enhancing or preserving our identities, no matter how minoritarian, may be useful and tactical, but if they are our goal then we are not philosophers. We are anthropocentric humanists ..." [62]

You've got to love sentences like that ...

V.

"This chapter explores ways in which art can be redefined to enhance the ethical nature of all action as expressive, affective, from personal actions to larger-scale activisms." [67]

I have to admit, whenever I hear the word art whilst I don't quickly reach for a gun, I do roll my eyes. Baudrillard was right; at best, all we can do in this era of transaesthetics is act out the comedy of art, just as we keep acting out the comedy of sex after the orgy.

I fear that poor Patricia is going to be disappointed if she pins her hopes on art as something that occupies a "privileged space of knowing/unknowing that separates it from science and philosophy" [69], no matter how she redefines it. I also think she'll ultimately be disappointed by activism - which she believes to be "the most urgently needed action in the world" [69].  

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the ahuman will encourage new forms of art and activism, with the latter becoming increasingly creative and thus an art in its own right; maybe the two will collapse into a vital symbiosis and engage with power, without object or aim, "ephemerally remaking [and unmaking] the world to cause beneficial territorial shifts" [75].

Maybe. But probably not. And - for the record - I'm appalled to see this described in the religious terms of hope, faith, and belief - what MacCormack calls non-secular intensities. I mean, c'mon ... I can accept an ethics of care, compassion and even grace (defined by Serres as a letting be and a stepping aside), but I'm not about to embrace the virtue of hope - and it's ironic to see MacCormack affirming something that only serves to prolong human existence.

As for faith, MacCormack writes:

"Like hope, which is never explicitly a set hope 'for' something, faith is not a faith 'in' something but rather a faith that there can be a world that does not behave this way forever [... that] there is more than the anthropocene and anthropocentrism." [77-78]

In other words, MacCormack's ahumanism demands trust in the possibility of an alternative future of which we have no knowledge and for which she cannot provide any persuasive arguments or evidence. That's fine for some, but I'm afraid I'd need a bit more than this sketchy promise before pledging myself to her cause and becoming a believer (or even giving up my sausage and egg McMuffin for breakfast).

But perhaps I just lack imagination (a key term for MacCormack), or the necessary courage to dream and "rise up against the anthropocene and its malignant destructive expressions of political violence and apathetic semiocapitalism which deny the materiality of the organisms who suffer" [86] ...

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 1 of this post (notes on the preface and introduction), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here. 

On the Quickness and Allure of Objects

Phoebe Stadler: Saucy (c. 1920)

collections.vam.ac.uk

Was ist Schnelligkeit? asks Heide. And it's an interesting question.

I suppose, for me at least, the quality of quickness is something I understand in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence and in terms of an object-oriented ontology.

In his essay 'The Novel' (1925), Lawrence describes the quick as an invisible flame of impersonal presence that flickers in the words and deeds of the individual. Unless, that is, they belong to the legions of the undead; living corpses with ready-made sensations who drive to work, chew their fast food, stare at the screen, and engage in idle talk that merely passes the word along (what Heidegger calls Gerede).

These men and women are awfully lifelike, but lifeless; for they have no quickness, writes Lawrence.

It's important to be clear on this point: the corpse-bodies Lawrence fears have not become less than human, but, strange as it may sound - unless one hears this phrase with Nietzschean ears - all too human (which is to say, all too limited and cut-off). Quickness is, therefore, certainly not the same as human being; in fact, it's the non-human element of man which is found in all things.

Lawrence likes to call it the God-flame, but I prefer to describe it as object-allure, if only because I find his religious language unhelpful and off-putting.* Either way, it means we have two types of object: (i) those that are quick (though not necessarily alive in the conventional organic sense of the term) and (ii) those that are dead (again, not in the sense that they lack or have lost life, but in the sense that they aren't quick or very alluring - and so don't really affect us in the same way).

Lawrence writes:

"In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn't even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead." 

Thus, interestingly - according to Lawrence - there are degrees of quickness; though he claims not to know how or why this is so, even if he knows for certain that it's the case. Probably, he speculates, the quickness of the quick lies in a "certain weird relationship" between objects; one that is "fluid, changing, grotesque or beautiful".

Again, I would discuss this relatedness in terms of allure; objects attract and lead other objects, including ourselves, into temptation and it's in this way that we and all things come into touch. The more they entice us, the stronger their allure, the quicker they are; the more we come into touch - with "snow, bed-bugs, sunshine, the phallus, trains, silk-hats, cats, sorrow, people, food, diphtheria, fuchsias, stars, ideas, God, tooth-paste, lightning, and toilet-paper"** - the quicker we are.

Of course, even dead objects retain some power of attraction and can seduce us - they like to be tickled as Lawrence puts it - but ultimately they lead us not into touch but into the void. Dead objects, in other words, tease but don't deliver the goods; they are indifferent to those doing the tickling and drain the quick of their quickness. They are strange attractors, like black holes.       

Notes

* I like the word allure as it is drawn from the language of seduction, which is the appropriate language in which to discuss objects philosophically. One might also note that the modern English word quick is of Germanic origin and is related not only to the Dutch term kwiek, meaning sprightly, but the German word keck, meaning saucy; another term belonging to the language of seduction. In sum, quickness goes beyond merely a question of speed - it's more than Schnelligkeit - just as it's more than vitality.

** With the use of a list like this, composed of seemingly random objects, Lawrence wishes to show that there are no absolutes; all things exist relative to one another upon a flat ontological field and/or within a general economy of the whole. We can call this a democracy of objects, like Levi Bryant, or a democracy of touch, like Lawrence.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177-90. Lines quoted p. 183.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Cry of the Masses', Poems Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 511-12.

Reflections on the Vacuum-Sealed Nature of Objects 2: Ethico-Political Considerations

Hiromi and Lisa by Photographer Hal

# 24 from the series Zatsuran (2013)

I illustrated in part one of this post how D. H. Lawrence's little read (and undervalued) 1922 novel Aaron's Rod anticipates the work of philosopher Graham Harman on the vacuum-sealed nature of objects. Here, I'd like to critically examine the latter's controversial and challenging notion in more detail ...

In a nutshell, Harman wants us to acknowledge something very obvious but not so easy to explain; namely, the fact that discernible, individual objects exist and that being isn't some shapeless, unified totality. Further, whilst these objects have relations with other objects, they aren't defined, determined, or exhausted by such. They always keep something of themselves withdrawn and in reserve; something hidden and untouchable, as Harman says, in the basement of being.

Ultimately, then, what gives to things their absolute distinctness is the fact that they are vacuum-sealed in perfect isolation and only ever have indirect (metaphorical) contact with one another; i.e., they only ever relate by translating one another (and in so doing generate difference).

This - if true - has interesting if not, indeed, crucially important ethical and political consequences; not least of all for any Lawrentians still hoping to establish a democracy of touch based on the interpenetration of bodies, the glad recognition of souls, and the re-establishment of the vital relations between objects which, according to Lawrence, were destroyed by the grand idealists.

Having said that, there is a positive aspect to Harman's thesis of withdrawal and isolation; namely, it allows objects to retain their volcanic integrity and thus to resist all attempts by external forces to control, coordinate, and exploit them. In other words, at some level, despite increasingly extended networks of power and surveillance, objects are essentially autonomous and ontological Gleichschaltung is an impossibility.

As Levi Bryant notes, nothing, for Harman, "is ever so defined, reduced, or dominated that it can't break free and be otherwise ... People, animals, minerals, technologies, and microbes are always threatening to erupt ..." In other words, all objects carry the potential for surprise, which is, of course, a revolutionary potential.

It's also a reason why we should treat them with caution and respect and attempt to see things from their perspective (Ian Bogost refers to this as alien phenomenology). This is more than simply a  question of exercising our human curiosity; it's about acknowledging that the world exists - and doesn't simply exist for us. Again, to quote Bryant here: "We live in a universe teaming with actants where we are actants among actants, not sovereigns organizing all the rest as the old Biblical narrative from Genesis would have it."

In conclusion: some commentators, I know, have little time for Harman and his object-oriented ontology; they aren't seduced by the speculative nature of his realism, nor charmed by the weirdness of his arguments. But, like Bryant, I still think that, at it's best, his work is original and engaging and does what all good philosophical writing should - i.e., encourage us to think outside the gate, even at the risk of losing our way or, perhaps, ending up on yet another foolish quest for that mysterious thing called the soul ...

See:

Levi Bryant, 'Harman, Withdrawal, and Vacuum Packed Objects: My Gratitude', posted on Larval Subjects (May 30, 2012): click here. 

Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).

To read part one of this post - Egoism a Deux - click here. 

How Love Bridges the Gap Between Objects

Even when, in a gesture of democratic ontological realism, you accept that all objects can be posited on the same plane of existence, with no one object determining the being of any other object, still the problem remains of the essential gulf that exists between things.

Which is why the forming of relationships in a world of withdrawn and autonomous objects, each with their own unique powers and capacities, is not easy; it requires that all things discover a way in which to translate one another across the void that separates them. 

But translation is not the same as representation. Human subjects qua subjects might metaphysically relate to the world by attempting to form truthful representations of reality, but this all-too-human way of knowing things doesn't really interest me; even if it has been the central concern of philosophy since Descartes. I tend to agree with Levi Bryant that questions concerning objects are misconceived if they are turned into purely epistemological ones of how we might know them. 

In other words, philosophy must be more than a type of anthropocentric conceit and posthumanism, if there is ever to be such a thing, must begin with the admission that subjects are objects and that human being is not a privileged category to which everything can and must be referred. Further, it must be acknowledged that the gulf between us and other objects is not something uniquely significant; that there is equally such a gap between, for example, a pineapple and a knife, as there is between us and items of cutlery.

Thus, as I say above, all things need to find a way to translate one another, or relate across the ontological divide - which is something of an art, something of a science, and something of a mystery. How do objects translate other objects, especially when all objects remain constitutively withdrawn not only from one another but from themselves? 

The answer, perhaps, is via a form of onto-erotics, or what Baudrillard terms in an somewhat different context, the seductiveness of things. For withdrawal is never total and entities as entities always manifest and expose themselves to a greater or lesser degree; they like to tease one another with the staging of their appearance-as-disappearance. Objects, if you will, are like those lovers who know how to delight us with their presence and then torment us with their absence. Timothy Morton describes them as 'strange strangers' whose existence we can never anticipate and being we can never fully know.

Philosophical theories of ontological immanence and weird realism might help us to better translate these strange strangers by remaining open to the possibilities of seduction and surprise, but so too do we need our poets and our objectophiles to help us proliferate unnatural alliances and establish a democracy of touch between entities of all kinds (be they dead or alive, natural or artificial, actual or virtual). Ultimately, existence is fucked into being.