Abstract
Alan Weisman's The World Without Us suggests that the death of our species will lead to the renewal of life as a whole on the planet, via the Earth's capacity for ‘self-healing’. Arguably, one answer to the question of posthuman subjectivities lies in such human extinction scenarios. There we can both meditate upon the conjunction of fear and optimism that characterizes contemporary posthumanisms and imagine what their possible ‘after-lives’ might be. The article begins by critiquing a philosophical tradition that extends from Darwin to transhumanism, in which we are invited, paradoxically, to celebrate our evolutionary rebirth following human extinction. This model presumes the (impossible) survival of the subject and also reinscribes anthropocentrist conceptions of ‘life’. Alternative models are considered in which the attenuation of exclusionary notions of human life is assumed but not exploited, where the human/non-human difference is disarticulated without a promise that it will be to ‘our’ benefit.
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Notes
1 See the front inside flap of the dust jacket of Weisman (2007).
2 Schwenger (2006) makes clear that the melancholy ‘felt by the subject’ in its relationship with the lost thing ‘is ultimately for the subject. It is we who are to be lamented, and not the objects that evoke this emotion in us without ever feeling it themselves’ (p. 2).
3 For two introductions to the various (and often contradictory) speculative realist attempts to think a world beyond thought, see Bryant et al (2011); and Harman (2010).
4 For a related point, see Jendrysik (2011), especially p. 35 and pp. 43–45.
5 For a discussion of the anthropocene as the geological period in which humanity's actions have had appreciable – and in some cases determinative – impacts upon planetary processes, see Crutzen (2002a) and Crutzen (2002b).
6 Although the scope of the question exceeds that of this essay, the possibility that Weisman's and, as we shall see, Darwin's respective visions of ‘perfection’ require extinction is reason for pause given the parallels with the biopolitical logic of ‘life that does not deserve to live’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 136). See also Foucault (2003), especially pp. 239–263.
7 I take this to be something like the question posed in Edelman (2004).
8 Having gone so far into the future as to arrive at the period immediately before the Sun's death, long after the disappearance of humankind, the protagonist of The Time Machine notes the ‘abominable desolation that hung over the world’ (Wells, 2009, p. 65). Similarly, in an essay titled ‘The Extinction of Man’ published the previous year, Wells writes of the ‘excessive egotism of the human animal that’ prevents us from being capable of conceiving of ‘a world without us’ (‘The Extinction of Man’, in The Time Machine, p. 143). Although the phrase anticipates Weisman's title, the passage's theme is more consistent with the work of H.P. Lovecraft, who frequently imagines ‘post-human’ futures (Lovecraft, 2009a, p. 752) as well as ‘pre-human’ worlds (Lovecraft, 2009b, p. 526). An early example of a literary exploration of the world without us, almost as celebratory as Weisman's, is Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘The New Adam and Eve’, which attempts, ‘in a mood half-sportive and half-thoughtful, to track [two] imaginary heirs of our mortality’ as they explore an earth from which ‘the flame of human life was extinguished’ only ‘yesterday’ (Hawthorne, 1996, p. 746).
9 For the history since Aristotle of the paradoxical concept of ‘Life’ itself, simultaneously all empirical living beings and the transcendental quality that guarantees their status as alive, see Thacker (2010).
For a more sympathetic account of this paradox in Weisman's text, see Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009). In an argument that is in some ways the inverse of my own, but which nevertheless ends in a similar place, Simon Estok criticizes The World Without Us for its ‘ecophobia’ (2010), especially p. 145.
On the spiritual and/or aesthetic consumerism of many ostensibly anti-consumerist environmentalisms, see Levinson (2000).
Brassier (2007) argues that the path forward for philosophy and ethics must go through, rather than around, an encounter with nihilism.
See Herbrechter and Callus (2008): ‘To read in a posthuman way is to read against one's self, against one's own deep-seated self-understanding as a member or even representative of a certain ‘species’. It is already to project an otherness to the human, to sympathise and empathise with a position that troubles and undoes identity while struggling to reassert what is familiar and defining. It is to locate oneself simultaneously within identity and otherness. … A posthumanist reading is enabled by the deconstruction of the integrity of the human and the other, of the natural and the alienable’ (pp. 95–96).
See Wolfe (1998): ‘posthumanist theory need not indulge either Foucauldian dystopianism or its compensatory nostalgia for the subject’ (pp. 41–42).
See Hodder (2012), especially pp. 87–88; Olsen (2010); and Brown (2001).
On this dismissive reflex in traditional anthropology, see Latour (2010).
See also Steven Jones's discussion of gamers’ ‘distributed intelligence’ (2008, p. 92) and Taylor's analysis of how their identities form via ‘nuanced practices of negotation’ between on- and offline environments (2006, p. 18). Much of this literature is more concerned with sociology rather than ontology, often for the purposes of revealing gamming's essential creativity and agency so as to protect it against charges of ‘zombification’ (Newman, 2008, p. 3).
See Deleuze (1992); and Latour's discussion of ‘folding humans and nonhumans into each other’ (1999, p. 176). See also Latour (2007), especially pp. 207–218. For a systems theory critique of the univocity of Deleuze's fold in particular, see Wolfe (1998), especially p. xxi, pp. 102–103, and pp. 114–124. Although Wolfe correctly notes the disagreement between Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann, I believe he fails to register the surprisingly deep formal similarities between the two. Compare, for instance, the emphasis on functional differentiation in Luhmann (1995) and in Deleuze and Guattari (1994).
On this eventfulness of matter, see two recent anthologies of the so-called new materialisms: Coole and Frost (2010) and Braun and Whatmore (2010).
According to DeLanda (1997), Bennett (2010) and Morton (2010), vital agencies need not be defined as living or animate in the conventional senses of these words but can extend even to inorganic things. On the order/noise distinction, see Serres (2007). For ‘identity’ as always already prosthetic, see Haraway (1991).
See Latour (2007), pp. 238–246; and Whitehead (1978), especially pp. 27–28. For a version of flat ontology that assumes that the separation or withdrawal of things is more primary than their relationality, see Harman's (2009) critique of Latour.
See also Bennett (2010, p. 54). Although this may seem far afield from Haraway's and Latour's attention to local contingencies and situated knowledge, Deleuze joins them in interweaving the micrological and the macrological in non-predetermined, non-anthropocentric processes.
On the besideness of ourselves, see Nancy (2008); and, from the perspective of queer affect theory, Sedgwick (2003).
See Derrida (2009), especially pp. 244–245.
See also Passoth et al (2012).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to the other participants of the ‘Whither Posthumanism?’ panel, especially Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter for organizing it, as well as to my graduate research assistant, Emma Calabrese, for her help in compiling some of the references listed here. Finally, I am very thankful for the input of the anonymous reviewers; the essay is the better for their interventions.
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Taylor, M. Whither life?. Subjectivity 5, 276–289 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2012.18