# Death of the PostHuman

Essays on Ex tinction, Vol. 1

Death of the PostHuman

*Death of the PostHuman* undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as 'theory,' and its contemporary supposedly posthuman aftermath. There can be no redemptive posthuman future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human—despite its normative intensity—can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. *Death of the PostHuman* argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. She has written many articles and books on visual culture, poetry,

literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture, including most recently *Theory and the Disappearing Future* with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis

seemingly posthuman futures.

Miller (2011).

Oil on board, 2009

Cover Image: "Shriek & Flash" (detail)

*Series*: Critical Climate Change

Dominic Minichiello © Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA

*Colebrook*

*Claire Colebrook*

Death of the PostHuman

#### **Critical Climate Change**

*Series Editors:* Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook

The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address. Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events. The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. As the pressures and realignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of 'life.' There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions. Critical Climate Change is oriented, in this general manner, toward the epistemopolitical mutations that correspond to the temporalities of terrestrial mutation.

## Death of the PostHuman

Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1

*Claire Colebrook*

# OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

with Michigan Publishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor 2014

First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2014 Freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.12329362.0001.001

Copyright © 2014 Claire Colebrook

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Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at Michigan Publishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP's editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form.

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## *Contents*

#### Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the patience, dedication and support of Open Humanities Press, and Sigi Jöttkandt in particular. For ongoing intellectual stimulus and friendship I thank Tom Cohen, Jami Weinstein and J. Hillis Miller.

#### *Introduction*

# **Framing the End of the Species: Images Without Bodies**

*Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae's behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that ah ken all the pros and cons, know that ah'm gaunnae have a short life, am ay sound mind etcetera, etcetera, but still want tae use smack? They won't let yae do it, because it's seen as a sign ay thir ain failure. The fact that ye jist simply choose to reject whit thae huv to offer. Choose us. Choose life.    (Irvine Welch,* Trainspotting*, 187-88)*

*the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life.*

There are three senses of extinction: the now widely discussed sixth great extinction event (which we have begun to imagine *and* witness, even if in anticipation); extinction by humans of other species (with the endangered species of the 'red list' evidencing our destructive power); and self-extinction, or the capacity for us to destroy what makes us human. All three senses of extinction require a nuanced conception of climate. Climate is at once an enclosing notion, imagined as the bounded milieu that is unavoidably ours, and a disturbing figure, for it is with the recognition *that there is climate*, or that the human *species* is now recognizable as a being that for all its seeming diversity is nevertheless bound into a unity of destructive power. (This is so much so that geologists are arriving at consensus regarding an 'Anthropocene epoch' where man's effect on the planet will supposedly be discernible as a geological strata readable well after man ceases to be, even if there are no geologists who will be present to undertake this imagined future reading (Crutzen 2000). Climate is not only, then, the surface or terrain upon which we find ourselves, but something that binds us to *this time* on the earth, with its own depletions and limits.)

There is, of course, the standard meteorological notion of climate which increasingly attracts our already over-taxed attention; but this concept of climate is only possible because of a broader thought-event where humans begin to imagine a deep time in which the human species emerges and withers away, and a finite space in which 'we' are now all joined in a tragedy of the commons. I would suggest that just as Darwinian evolution altered the very modes of scientific and imaginative thinking, such that new forms of narrative and knowledge were required to think of man as a species emerging within time (Beer 1983), so global climate change is similarly catastrophic for the human imaginary. It becomes possible to think of climate as the milieu that is necessary for our ongoing life, *and* as the fragile surface that holds us all together in one web of risked life, even if we cannot practically grasp or manage the dynamics of this totality (Gardiner 2006). The concept of climate is also split between knowledge and denial: on the one hand talk of climate draws all bodies (organic and otherwise) into a single complex, multiply determined and dynamic whole; on the other hand, any brief glance at climate change policy and politics evidences a near psychotic failure to acknowledge or perceive causal connections with dire consequences. In this respect we need to embark on a notion of climate change that includes the radical alteration of knowledge and affect that accompanies the very possibility of *climate.* It is only possible to think of climate change in the meteorological sense—with humans now bound to volatile ecologies that they are at once harming and ignoring—if some adjustment is made to the ways in which we think about the relations among time, space and species. A necessarily expansive sense of climate change encompasses a mutation of cognitive, political, disciplinary, media and social climates. The fact that we start to think about climate as a general condition that binds humans to an irreversible and destructive time means *both* that climate becomes an indispensable concept for thinking about the new modes of knowledge and feeling that mark the twenty-first century in terms of our growing sense of precarious attachment to a fragile planet, *and* that climate is an alibi. We talk about climate, ecology, globalism and even environment (as that which environs) even though the experience of climate change reveals multiple and incongruent systems for which we do not have a point of view. We are at once thrown into a situation of urgent interconnectedness, aware that the smallest events contribute to global mutations, at the same time as we come up against a complex multiplicity of diverging forces and timelines that exceed any manageable point of view.

In a recent fable that allegorized the human relation among memory, destruction and the future of life, Nick Bostrom suggests that the human species would remain complacent about its catastrophic history and future as long as it continues to forget that its situation *is* catastrophic. We have taken the catastrophe of human existence as natural and irredeemable: only a counter-narration in which we vanquish destruction will let us see just how death-inured we have become (Bostrom 2005). More recently, climate change scientists have started to play with new strategies for awakening public affect: perhaps the focus on hope needs to give way to mobilizations of fear, whereby we learn to 'hug the monster,' in order to shift from inertia and quiescence to action.1 How is it that the human species, seemingly so hungry for life and dominance, has conveniently forgotten its own self-extinguishing tendencies? We can only pose the question of human extinction—the fact that humans will become extinct, the fact that we cause other extinctions, and also that we are extinguishing what renders us human—if we locate the problem of climate change inaction in a broader terrain of ecological destruction. The very climates—cognitive, industrial, economic, affective, technological, epistemological and meteorological—that render our life possible are also self-destructive (both destructive of the self, and destructive of climate itself).

There is a widespread lament regarding a trajectory of self-extinction occurring in the human brain. According to Susan Greenfield, in her book *ID,* we are losing identity: where our brains once operated by a synthesizing power of grammar, syntax and critique we are now seduced by a culture of stimulus (Greenfield 2008). We are not just losing one of our critical powers—our power to represent or synthesize what is not ourselves—we are losing our very selfhood. For 'we' are—*as* human, as identities—just this evolved synthesizing power. Greenfield locates her diagnosis of identity within a broader argument regarding the brain and its self-forming capacities. A certain self-loss is required for stimulus and pleasure, but a certain neural extension and order is required for meaning and self. In her earlier work Greenfield had argued for a healthy or normal balance between the capacity for the joy of fleeting sensation (such as the first taste of morning coffee) and the ability to link sensations into some broader network of selfhood and significance (Greenfield 2002). If there were no capacity to enjoy the simple moment we would suffer from depression, or an extreme search for meaning that we may never be able to fulfill; drugs that treat depression enable a release from the grip of significance. But today—perhaps—it is the fleeting insignificance that is taking over twenty-first century neural architecture. The diagnostic dimension of Greenfield's work lies in its lament regarding the new modes and temporalities of visual culture, where the transient ecstasies of video games overtake the sustained focus and pleasure of complex narrative and argument. This lament of human self-loss achieved through the over-consumption of stimulus is not Greenfield's alone. Her work keeps company with Carr's *The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain* (2010)*,* Jackson and McKibben's *Distraction* (2008)*,*  Wolf 's *Proust and the Squid* (2007), Winifred Gallagher's *Rapt* (2008)*,* N. Katherine Hayles's (2007) theory of the transition from deep attention to hyper attention, and Bernard Stiegler's (2010) lament regarding the short circuits of transindividuation (with humans having lost the orientation of care). Precisely at the moment of its own loss the human animal becomes aware of what makes it human—meaning, empathy, art, morality—but can only recognize those capacities that distinguish humanity at the moment that they are threatened with extinction.

It is possible to argue, as Giorgio Agamben (1998) has done, that there has always been a sense of the human capacity for failing to be human. We can lose ourselves—extinguish ourselves—because we are nothing more than potentiality. If humans were always and already fully human, if humanity were a simply actuality, then there would never be the possibility of failing to realize either one's reason, or to recognize rational humanity in others. This is why Agamben has isolated a last chance for redemption precisely at this point in our history when it becomes apparent that what we are is not something essential that will necessarily come into being: our humanity is not an actuality from which we can draw grounds for action. The fact that we forget our *impotentiality*—that we treat humans as factual beings with a normality that dictates action—has reached crisis point in modernity, especially as we increasingly suspend the *thought* of our fragility for the sake of ongoing efficiency. Both totalitarianism and democratic hedonism are, for Agamben, forms of deadening managerialism. Both act on the basis of *man* as an actuality. It is at this point of exhaustion, when we have become frozen spectators in a world in which images appear as ready-mades, that we can see both that there is no guarantee that we will be human and that it *is* human to forget oneself. For Agamben it is both the modern horrors of totalitarianism (where humans are reduced to so much manageable and disposable matter or animality) *and* modern democratic hedonism (where we become nothing more than the targeted consumers of dazzling spectacle) that demonstrates human *impotentiality*, our essential capacity not to actualize that which would distinguish as human.

Most importantly, this highly human inhumanity seems to center strangely on the organ that organizes the human organism; for it is the same eye that reads and theorizes—that looks with wonder at the heavens—that is also seduced, spellbound, distracted and captivated by inanity. Immanuel Kant already drew on a tradition of philosophical wonder when he isolated man's capacity to look into the heavens as both a source of delusion that would draw him away from grounded knowledge into enthusiasm, and as the necessary beginning of a power of thinking that would not be tied solely to sensation (Kant 1999, 269-70). The eye is geared to spectacle as much as speculation, with speculation itself being both productively expansive in its capacity to imagine virtual futures and restrictively deadening in its tendency to forget the very life from which it emerges. Indeed there is something essentially self-destructive about the human theoretical eye: our very openness to the world—the very relation that is our life—is precisely what seduces us into forgetting that before there is an eye that acts as a camera or window there must have been something like an orientation or distance, a relation without relation. I would suggest that we ought to think, today in an era of climate change, about moralizing laments regarding human reason's self-loss alongside various posthuman theorizations that human reason is constituted by a certain self-forgetting. The human animal or human eye is torn between spectacle (or captivation by the mere present) and speculation (ranging beyond the present at the cost of its own life).

There are two directions this criticism of the embodied eye can take: one is to expand the sense of the body, to imagine a receptive or perceptive power that is not a simple snapshot of the world but a full and expansive openness. Here we might identify a pseudo-Heideggerian criticism of Descartes that was taken up by cognitive science: Heidegger had already diagnosed Western metaphysics with Descartes as a fulcrum: Descartes is able to establish man as the 'subject' (or as that which remains present) because Western thought has always proceeded by forgetting the temporality through which all being comes into presence (Heidegger 1968). By the time Descartes establishes the subject as that which precedes and provides a foundation, 'humanism' has definitively forgotten that there is no such thing as man as a simply existing thing with an essence. For Heidegger what is required is not a retrieval of some pre-Cartesian connectedness to the world, with man and world being co-present; rather, before there is the dyad of man and world there is something like disclosure or revealing. Contemporary cognitive science and certain philosophies of the human have drawn upon this anti-Cartesianism to insist that man is not a camera, not a computer, and the eye is not a window (Wrathall and Malpas 2000; Thompson 2007; Wheeler 2005). Where such contemporary uses of Heidegger differ from Heidegger is in their diagnosis of Cartesianism as an accidental lapse rather than as evidence of humanity's self-forgetting 'essence.' These pseudo-Heideggerian diagnoses suggest that Cartesianism can be overcome by returning man to the richer expansive life from which he has become detached. The subtitle of Andy Clark's book says it all: 'putting, brain, body, and world together again' (Clark 1997). For Heidegger, though, there is a necessary forgetting in any disclosure of being: to experience the world as present for me, and to begin questioning—as we must—from this already given world, relies upon a hiddenness or non-revealing that we must leave behind in living the world as our own. We begin *in media res*, always already thrown into a world that appears as so many natural and separate things. Our tendency to forget, and to live life inauthentically—*not* recognizing Being as the site for all clearing, as though the world were just this way naturally is not something one can simply place behind oneself as an unfortunate philosophical error. For Heidegger in-authenticity or humanism (where we simply take ourselves to be a privileged thing among things) is not an external and unfortunate event but has to do with the very mode of being's appearance: we see being appear, but do not attend to its coming into being. One mode of phenomenology after Heidegger has, however, taken the form of a correction or adjustment: we should overcome the deep problems of how we know or arrive at having a world and accept that the world just *is* that which is always already given and meaningful for living beings. Phenomenology should be naturalized and tied to a process of embodied knowledge. We are not minds who represent a world, but organisms *from which* the capacity and figure of knowing mind emerged.

But there's another path, another way of dealing with man's tendency to reify himself. This other departure from a restricted subjectivism proceeds not by broadening the self to include emotions, dynamism and the non-cognitive, but by tearing the eye from the body. Rather than restore the human to some unified and expansive vision it might be possible to think of the eye as a machine. This machine would not be a computer, for a genuine machine does not have a central organizing program but is put to work through connections; one could consider synthesizers as computers receiving inputs and turning out data, *or* as machines in their creation and recreation of connections. For Deleuze and Guattari, the reference to synthesizers is *not* another metaphor for thinking, where we substitute one machine for another. Thought *is* a synthesizer: just as musical synthesizers take the sounds of the world and repeat, create and mutate various differences, so thought can maximize rather than diminish the complexity of sensations:

 A synthesizer places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually making 'fundamentally heterogeneous elements and up turning into each other in some way.' The moment this conjunction occurs there is common matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the assemblage. The synthesizer has replaced judgment, and matter has replaced the figure or formed substance. It is no longer even appropriate to group biological, physico-chemical and energetic intensities on the one hand, and mathematical, aesthetic, linguistic, informational, semiotic intensities, etc., on the other. The multiplicity of systems of intensities conjugates or forms a rhizome throughout the entire assemblage the moment the assemblage is swept up by these vectors or tensors of flight (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 121)

Before exploring the 'multiplicity of systems of intensities' in detail, we can go back over the relation between the eye and human self-extinction, between the eye that views the world in order to enable survival, and the eye that then becomes frozen or seduced by its own imaging power—to the point where the eye takes in a frozen image of its self. Bergson has argued for an economy of the eye and creative difference: in order to release itself from merely surviving in the world, the human eye organizes the world into conceptualized units, mastering the world by reducing difference. This intellectual process allows for increasing technologies and the furtherance of systems of order: the intellect is at home with technology and matter, or that which remains the same through time and can be mastered though repetition. What is abandoned is intensity—the infinitesimally small differences and fluxes that the eye edits out. For Bergson the problem with this difference-reducing mode of the intellect is when mind turns back upon itself, and fixes upon a static image: thought is no longer intuited (as it should be) as a dynamic creative force, but appears as a brain, representing self, thinking substance or 'man' (Bergson 1913, 196).

This argument for the self as *not* being a substance but, rather, the condition for the organized perception of substance, has a long philosophical and moral history. If Aristotle argued that what distinguished us as humans was not merely perception of the world, nor consumption of the world but the capacity for perception and consumption to go beyond what *is* to consider what *ought* to be, and if Plato also argued that we should not merely perceive but think about that which gives itself *to*  *be perceived,* this moral distinction becomes formal in modernity. That is, Plato and Aristotle concede that man is a biological being but with a capacity for reason, a capacity that distinguishes humans from other beings. But the modern theory of the subject, with Descartes positing a different *substance—*or *res cogitans*—makes a difference of kind and modality with regard to humans and their relation to images. 'Man' is the being to whom the world is given for representation; what man himself is can never be known in itself, but only after the event of perception of the world. For Foucault, it was this shift from a world that possessed its own order and hierarchies to some distinction between ordered world and man as representing being that marked a historical a priori: what shifted was not an event within time but the modality of time itself. In modernity historical time is that through which 'man' both recognizes that he emerges from material conditions, at the same time as the very logic of life that requires him to labor, speak and form social wholes can only be known after the event (Foucault 1970).

If pre-moderns sought to elevate humans among other animals, modernity increasingly rejects human superiority and refuses to see man as rational animal; for man is *pure reason.* Kant does not argue that we have to be more than merely biological or animal beings, he insists that we are not beings at all. Rather, there are only beings because there is something like an organizing or synthesizing power. There is a world because there is a subject to whom a world is given. It makes no sense to strive to perceive or know the self, to try and capture the self as something that might be viewed. In the beginning is a potentiality *for viewing* from which we constitute a viewed world. We then imagine—ex post facto—that there must be selves who would be there to be viewed. Whereas Kant argued that there must be something like *the* subject who existed as this condition for all intuition (even if this subject cannot be known), Bergson (1913) argued that there was no subject who intuited images, just images or perceptions *from which* we posit some thing—the brain—that provides the illusory image that would cause all images.

But if pre-modern philosophy from at least Plato onwards argues that we *ought* not think of ourselves only as appetites, for we are responsible for our organizing relation to the world, modern philosophy argues that we are *only* organizing relations. There is not a self who perceives; there are perceptions, from which something like a self is constituted. We cannot explain the self 's relation to images because of the interests and appetites that are its natural base. Desires and appetites are possible only because there is imaging: in the beginning is the relation. We can think of Freud here for whom pleasures are possible because of a prior genesis of a relation between desire and desired; the libido is a force that forms a relatively stable or 'cathected' pool of ongoing equilibrium, relating to the outside world in terms of its own tendency towards quiescence (Freud 2011). The desiring self is possible only because of a prior distribution that emerges from perception; a relation between self and other is formed *through* perception and does not precede perception

Something quite distinct structures modern claims for the relation between mind and image. It is not only the case that the self emerges from organizing perception, but also that perception can destroy the self. In *Beyond the Pleasure Principle* Freud observes his grandson throwing a cotton reel in and out of his cradle, while intoning '*Fort/Da'* (away/here) and it is from this observation that Freud argues that in addition to the self 's formation of a stable border between itself and the world, there is also a tendency to want to destroy or annihilate that distance. If pleasure is managing the relation between perceiver and the manageable influx of stimulus, then *beyond* pleasure there lies a tendency towards annihilation of distance, a dissolution of the bounded and perceiving organism.

What if the brain that is supposedly properly (in its human mode) oriented towards synthesis were at risk of falling back, of devolution? For some time it has been noted that there is an anxiety regarding mere images: the society of the spectacle (Debord 1973), a world of simulation (Baudrillard 1994), a world of passive consumption (Adorno 2001) or mere exhibition without aura (Benjamin 2008), a world of hyper attention rather than deep attention (Hayles 2007), at once seems to destroy the brain's evolved powers, and yet also give the lie to a certain destructive illusion regarding the brain as image. If we have lamented for so long—since Kant at least—that man tends to forget that he is a subject and tends to take himself to be just substance, then why are we so alarmed today by the brain's tendency to destroy any image or sense of itself, to be nothing other than the stimulus it receives? After all, this loss of self seems to be the fulfillment of a long modern striving for anti-self-consciousness or pure immediacy (Hartman 1970). Have we arrived, perhaps unwillingly, at Emerson's transformation of the self into a transparent eyeball (Emerson 1982, 39)? And yet this achievement of what was once a Romantic and existential imperative for consciousness to be nothing other than its perceptual relation to the world, a pure process without reifying ground, is being met with mourning and alarm.

First, consider all the ways in which 'we' are now reacting with horror to our own capacity *not* to be ourselves.

This ranges from neo-Kantian claims that without the commitment to some idea of who I am—without some ongoing identification of what I would do if I were to remain true to the idea I have of myself—then 'I' am not a self at all (Korsgaard 2008, 86). There are also neurological claims regarding the importance of ongoing synthesis, ranging from Greenfield's moral anxiety over a culture of mere stimulus, to Antonio Damasio's claim that the self is not, as Descartes would have it, a thing that feels, but a receptive and creative structure of feeling *from which* it might then be possible to have a snapshot attitude to reality. If we lose sight of that feeling self, of the emotional brain, or of the naturally affective, connected and world-oriented self then we risk mistaking mind for mere machine or computer (Damasio 2000).

When today—with horror—we look at young minds, we ask how they have become nothing more than cameras or computational devices. The young brains of today are not affected or world-oriented; they manipulate Facebook numbers with ruthless algorithmic force, and ingest images without digestion or rumination. We watch, with horror, as the human brain reverts to being not so much a reader of Proust as akin to a squid, or mere life (Wolf 2007). This tendency to be nothing more than a screen for images is observed as at once the brain's horrific tendency towards self-extinction (an internal and ever-present threat) and as accidental or extrinsic (something that has assaulted us from without, by way of technology and modernity).

The diagnoses of the brain's and humanity's capacity to destroy itself are persistent and manifold, ranging from a supposed neural devolution caused by spectacle-stimulus culture to various anxieties about overingestion (where we glut ourselves on destructive images and various psychotropic drugs that diminish the brain's synthesizing powers). And yet, at the same time, this release of the intuition of images from the organizing self of Cartesian subjectivism is hailed as redemption from the rigidity of man: no longer do we enslave ourselves to the notion of the autonomous, disembodied, affectless and world-divorced subject. One of the many and varied modes of posthumanism hails an end to human exceptionalism and cognition-oriented models, and instead begins from one already integrated, dynamic and connected world. There is no 'really hard problem' about the relation between mind and world, for the mind is an effect of relations, not something that has to act in order to represent a world to which it must subsequently relate (Flanagan 2007). It is not the case that we begin life as observing, representing beings who then become through receptivity. Rather, in the beginning is a dynamic and world-oriented receptivity *from which* organized cognition, and the sense of the self as subject or man emerges. It is from a primary openness to the world, a primarily sensed world, that there emerges the sense of one who sees.

This ambivalent observation of the self-extinguishing tendency of the brain's capacity for imaging does not pertain only to philosophy, theory or recent theses of the brain. There are also popular accounts of our selfattrition, with our over-consumption of everything from the internet and Facebook to empty fats and calories, indicating that the very mechanisms that led to out expansion are the same that will lead to our demise. Beyond all the laments and moral proclamations regarding our falling away from the activity of human reason, and beyond all the posthuman celebrations that there is no such thing as 'man' and that we are really always already at one with one web of life, we might ask how it is possible for humans to have this panicked (or joyous) apprehension of self-loss. If humans really are at one with the world of which they are nothing more than living and creative perceivers, why have we felt for so long that we are disengaged and rational minds? How did 'Descartes's error' take hold? Or, if mind and reason are our proper self-creating potentialities, how is it that the spectacle of the world has lured us into destroying ourselves? Why are our own creations, technologies and desires the very mechanisms that preclude us from being most properly ourselves? It is as though our excessive glutting on images—from the seduction by media labels and visual stimulus to the voyeurism of disaster porn—evidences the brain's fragility to be nothing more than itself, a mere screen rather than a properly self-organizing whole. The thousands of years of evolved complexity can fall away through overconsumption. Just as the very desire for fats and sugars that propelled the body to hunt and develop technologies for metabolic stability and survival will drive the modern body into obesity, hypertension and an early grave, so the darting eye that stimulated the brain into becoming a reading and interpreting animal, may also be at the forefront of the human species' cognitive atrophy. And does this not say something profound about climate: that the human species' damaging of its own milieu is not an accident that we might otherwise have avoided, precisely because climate—as *our* milieu—is something that our very dependence upon will preclude us from ever really seeing?

Both of these questions—of self-destruction and milieu-destruction are economic problems. (Both Freud and Bergson argued that the self was an effect of investment, by postponing the discharge of energy and allowing a pool of force that would be relatively stable through time.) The human animal delayed consumption of immediate resources, developed hunting and farming techniques in order to store energy, and so then freed energy and resources for further technical-intellectual-moral development (Ayala 2010). The viewing eye also delayed immediate response, developing concepts and perceptive technologies that enabled greater representational sophistication. V.S. Ramachandran speculates that the self and the notion of mind emerged in a survival tendency to anticipate the actions of others (Ramachandran 2003). The viewing eye becomes a reading and organizing apparatus, allowing 'man' to become a subject. These same replicating technologies, and life-propelling investments allowing us to fashion cinematic, computational, virtual reality and televisual technologies—would eventually sacrifice the reading brain to the merely stimulated eye.

Apart from the general interest of observing a widespread anxiety regarding the brain's own capacity to destroy itself through the very perceptive power that generated its supposedly proper potentiality in the first place, it is possible to orient this discussion towards the perception of futurity.

Is not the problem of both sides—the dire prediction that we are losing our capacity to synthesize ourselves *and* the posthuman affirmation that we are really, properly, nothing more than a dynamic power to perceive—that there is still (for all the talk of loss) a reliance on a normative notion of the human, whereas what is required today is an inhuman perception? For all the talk of *climate change* we assume that the climate is what environs us, and that change—or the danger of change—needs to be calculated according to the degree to which it enables or precludes ongoing existence of humans (Mann 2009). If biodiversity is a prima facie good then surely *any* ecosystem—even one that emerged after human extinction—would answer the requirement for ongoing life? And if biodiversity is not a prima facie good, and is only good insofar as it offers ecosystem services for humans, then the very reasons why we might finally act in order to maintain biodiversity—in order to continue to live—seem to be hampered by our drive for life. The very eye that has opened up a world to the human species, has also allowed the human species to fold the world around its own, increasingly myopic, point of view. Today, we might start to question the appropriate point of view from which we might observe and evaluate the human viewing eye: from our own greater will to survive, *or* would it not be better to start to look at the world and ourselves without assuming our unquestioned right to life?

Our very narration of the brain and its emergence as *the* properly synthesizing milieu from which all other imaging milieus need to be considered, shelters us from the thought of the inhuman images that confront us at the limits of the embodied eye. We can recall, here, Deleuze's criticism of Bergson, which is technical and counter-vital. Bergson, like so many other early modernists mourned the living and dynamic eye that had been sacrificed to technological expediency. For Bergson the intellect cuts up the world in order to achieve managerial efficiency and then subjects itself to that same technical calculus. The mind starts to operate with an image of itself as some type of viewing machine. Redemption, for Bergson, lies in retracing the path, regaining a vitality that would no longer be that of the bounded organism. Intuition would pass beyond its enclosed self-interests to arrive at the perception of life's duration or *élan vital*. For Deleuze, by contrast, the problem is that the eye remains too close to the lived. (So, today, when we demand 'reality' of television and cinema, or if we criticize cultural production for being too irrelevant or divorced from everyday life, we do so because we think there is such a thing as life and reality to which vision ought to be subordinate.) Rather than asking the eye to become organic once more, and to re-find its place in life, Deleuze asks for an inhuman perception: can we imagine the world without us, *not* as *our* environment or climate? Drawing on Bergsonism, rather than Bergson's concrete example of the fallen nature of cinematic perception, Deleuze calls on philosophy to 'open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman durations (*durations* which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition' (Deleuze 1988, 28). It is the *cutting* power of the eye that needs to be thought: the eye would be approached as a form of synthesizer, but as an analog rather than digital synthesizer. That is: the eye does not need to free itself from imposed distinctions to return to the flow of life, but should pursue ever finer cuts and distinctions, beyond its organic thresholds.

How might we imagine a world without organic perception, without the centerd points of view of sensing and world-oriented beings? Is there such a thing as perception without a *world?* (Think, here, of Heidegger's remark that a stone 'has' no world, which is a way of saying that a stone has no climate, for a stone has no concern for 'its' world or environment.) *This would not be a world without reading, as though abandoning the eye of grammar would return us to an inhuman lifelessness.* Instead, the reading would take a radically different form. After humans have ceased to be present on the planet, their history will remain readable in a quasi-human sense: the earth's strata will be inscribed with scars of the human capacity to create radical and volatile climactic changes. But one might consider a form of reading beyond this quasi-human and discerning mode: if, following Heidegger, the stone has no world, how do we account for the fossil records or archives borne by the stone? What might be thought is the extinction of the climactic eye: can we imagine a mode of reading the world, and its anthropogenic scars, that frees itself from folding the earth's surface around human survival? How might we read or perceive other timelines, other points of view and other rhythms? The fossil record opens a world *for us*, insofar as it allows us to read back from the brain's present to a time before reading; strata will continue beyond human reading, but if inscription continues is it too much of a stretch to say that the earth will remain as a 'reading' of at least one point of the universe? We use this term in literary and art criticism frequently, saying that a certain film offers 'a reading' of a certain event: we do not simply mean that the author is reading an event, for that may not have happened. The earth, after humans, will offer 'a reading' of a species' history, just as we might say that *Robinson Crusoe* offers 'a reading' of race, empire and capitalism, even if neither Defoe nor his readers actually actualized the sense of the reading.

*Why have we assumed that reading and readability should take syntactical forms?*

Here I want to refer to what geologists have posed as the new anthropocene era, where it is imagined—after humans—that our scar on the earth would be readable for something like a future geologist. Not only do we imagine what *would be readable* for a world without readers, we also have to deploy and imagine (from within geology) a different mode of stratigraphic imaging. Stratigraphy, at present, is a mode of reading past layers, but the positing of the anthropocene era relies on looking at our own world and imagining it as it will be when it has become the past. In imagining this world after humans we are reading what is not yet written or inscribed. We can see, now, from changes in the earth's composition that there will be a discernible strata that—in a manner akin to our dating of the earth's already layered geological epochs—will be readable. This strata or text of the earth does not yet exist; we abstract from the human eye and its reading of the inhuman past, to imagine what would be readable, after humans, in a mode analogous to the human eye. One can only open up to this post-Anthropocene point of view if we start to view this world beyond the bounds of climate, and see climate as one expression—among many—of a broader time and broader (inhuman) life. Perhaps, then, the moral outrage about the death of active and synthesizing vision, or the premature hailing of the world as already posthuman, needs to be tempered by the thought of the seeing brain that looks beyond itself. What we should *not* do is try to retrieve or repair a proper human vision; nor should we think, too easily, that we have abandoned human myopia once and for all.

This allows for a new thought of the brain's self-extinguishing tendency. If there is an anxiety regarding the eye-brain's seduction by images to the point of distraction, is not the figure of the evolved, self-organizing, connected and connecting brain also a lure or figure that precludes us from questioning the worth of the imaging brain? There is a strange torsion operating between the shrill cries lamenting the brain's captivation by spectacle, and the supposedly opposing counter-image of the good flourishing mind-brain. In response we might ask seriously what all these diagnoses of the reading brain and its atrophy amount to for a thought of art and climate change.

First, if the reading eye did have a proper mode—if the human brain had as its proper potentiality the mode of syntactical, synthesizing and world-ordering vision—how would we evaluate the last centuries of aesthetic judgment, which have relied on destroying the brain's capacity for comprehensive consumption? One doesn't have to be a fan of Duchamp and the avant-garde to note that there is something interesting, at the very least, in visual productions that short-circuit recognition. Indeed, one might say that climate change should not require us to return to modes of reading, comprehension and narrative communication but should awake us from our human-all-too-human narrative slumbers.

In Danny Boyle's *127 Hours* (2010)*,* in the film's revelatory final quarter, the central character's voice provides a voiceover declaring that all moments in his life have been leading up to this point. The screen is split into three panels, with one of the panels depicting the depleting battery indicator on his camcorder. At this stage, and for all the character knows, his self-made film and testimony will never be viewed, and yet—even so—he proclaims a moment of destined union between the end of his own life and the earth's history: from the first comet that struck the earth to create life to this final point of self-narration, all this was destined to converge on this filmed present (or so he believes). This temporal point one of the film's peaks—is at once one of human heroism, confirmed by the final scene where the protagonist and his family are seated on a suburban sofa viewing the cinematic audience the way we have just viewed his triumph. And yet at the very moment that this central character's destiny is related, the film's visual field explodes into a *geological* vision—the camera eye being taken over by the dazzling sun, which in turn dissolves into layers of rock and water beyond human time and perception. This cinematic seduction is quite different in kind from our tendency to be captivated by faces, bodies, objects of consumption and order.

This geological eye operates alongside the lulling eye of the forming human power; it is not the simply destructive eye of the visual avant garde. It is not just the willful assertion of the desire for the human to assert its mastery by freeing itself from instrumental and comforting images. It is a positively geological vision, a seduction not by the light that warms and illuminates but a radiation that moves beyond organicism. This light appears through the cracks of our own survival mechanisms: in Danny Boyle's cinema alone we can see it in *Sunshine* of 2007 (where the sun of light towards which the space mission travels is figured as that which must be viewed but which remains as *not* viewable), and in the sublime scene of the Sydney opera house as a frozen wasteland in *28 Weeks Later* (2007)*.* The very titles of these films—hours, weeks, days are intensive lived periods in which something like the unlived and unlivable takes hold.

Jacques Rancière has commented on a certain double nature of the image that defines art: commenting on Roland Barthes's *Camera Lucida,* Rancière notes that Barthes (who had begun his career by aiming to strip images of their myth or lure and did so *by reading* what appeared to be enigmatically frozen as actually the outcome of human history and labor) reversed this in *Camera Lucida* by affirming a dazzling power of the *image as such* that occurs when photography becomes an art (Rancière 2009). For Rancière this is not noteworthy because of some interest in Barthes's biography, but because it discloses art's double relation to the image, a doubleness inherent not only in photography but also in the novel. For Rancière, the novel as art at once describes and images, *and* draws attention to (while also destroying) any simple notion that the image is secondary and effaces itself before that which it indexes. Rancière is not as indebted to the French avant-garde as Barthes, or Deleuze, for whom art is the release of affects and precepts beyond the lived, or Derrida, for whom literature is an absolute precariousness that has no referential outside other than that which it traces from itself. But there is a sense in Rancière's notion of art as a release of image from anything other than its own dazzling materiality without reference or relation, of a surmounting of a certain anthropocentrism of the aesthetic image. It as though a release from systems of *human* reference would somehow yield the shining of light in itself.

To this extent all art leading up to the avant-garde would be art and image only to the degree to which it was anti-mimetic, or *other than* any form of reference, as though art somehow were god-like, freed from any necessity to be anything at all, liberated from all constituting relations. This, for Rancière, is the two-sided nature of the image.

I would suggest that something like a third side of the image is prompted by the thought experiment of extinction. By referring to extinction as a thought experiment I want to move in two directions. If we think of the experimental passage to extinction as *thought—*if we imagine thinking as a variation that takes place *from function* but essentially risks all function—then thinking of life as mindful requires thinking of mind as intrinsically destructive. Thought occurs when relations between terms are destructive, when there is a *not* knowing or misprision. Life occurs not with ongoing self-sameness but with an experimental variation that could be construed as *risk,* except that risk implies betting, strategy or even the venturing *of* some being, whereas it is only *after* variation that one might refer *ex post facto* to a mutation that is interpreted as *good for*  some being or some environmental fit. And this is also why *environment*  (like climate in its narrow meteorological sense) is not such a helpful term, given the notion of surrounding or environing—as though beings varied to fit a world. Extinction—as thought experiment—destroys such notions; there is just variation that is not variation *of* any being. So if extinction is thought experiment, it is because the process of extinction is a variation without a given end determined in advance; thinking possesses an annihilating power.

A certain thought of delimited extinction, the extinction of humans, opens up a variability or intrusion of a different side of the image. This is a geological, post-anthropocene or disembodied image, where there is some experimental grasping at a world that would not be the world for *a* body, nor the world *as* body. This mode of impersonal imaging differs from an avant-garde immanence of aesthetic matters or sensations, for such notions *tend* towards a god-like self-sufficiency. The avant-garde sought to think of the liberation of the image from man, but in doing so it created a heightened subjectivism where 'we' might liberate ourselves from function and become pure perception or pure becoming. In the era of extinction we can go beyond a self-willing self-annihilation in which consciousness destroys itself to leave nothing but its own pure nonbeing; we can begin to imagine imaging for other inhuman worlds. That is to say: rather than thinking of the posthuman, where we destroy all our own self-fixities and become pure process, we can look positively to the inhuman and other imaging or reading processes.

What happens if one thinks of the vision of no one, of the human world without humans that is still there *to be seen*? What remains might still take the form of 'a' vision or referring eye—the scene of a human world as if viewed without any body. The positing of an anthropocene era (or the idea that the human species will have marked the planet to such a degree that we will be discernible as a geological strata) deploys the idea of human imaging—the way we have already read an inhuman past in the earth's layers—but does this by imagining a world in which humans will be extinct. The anthropocene thought experiment also alters the modality of geological reading, not just to refer to the past as it is for us, but also to *our* present as it will be without us. We imagine a viewing or reading in the absence of viewers or readers, and we do this through images in the present that extinguish the dominance of the present. The figure of a frozen Sydney opera house, a London where Trafalgar Square is desolate, layers of rock distorted through a camera lens that is not the point of view of any body, an underwater Manhattan, or a sunlight so bright it would destroy the eye—all these experiments strive to image a world *as image*  (as referential) but not referential *for* any body. These images cannot be sustained, and are unsustainable; they—like the thought of extinction itself—will always be *for us*, and are always co-opted by the narrative lures they fragment. They nevertheless indicate an era or epoch that has begun to sense, if not have a sense of, a world without bodies.

#### *Notes*

1. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/07/478984/hug-the-monsterwhy-so-many-climate-scientists-have-stopped-downplaying-the-climatethreat/?mobile=nc

#### *Chapter 1*

### **Extinct Theory**

*Of the Earth, the present subject of our scenarios, we can presuppose a single thing: it doesn't care about the questions we ask about it. What we call a catastrophe will be, for it, a contingency. Microbes will survive, as well as insects, whatever we let loose. In other words, it is only because of the global ecological transformations we can provoke, which are potentially capable of putting in question the regimes of terrestrial existence we depend on, that we can invoke the Earth as having been put in play by our histories. From the viewpoint of the long history of the Earth itself, this will be one more 'contingent event' in a long series. (Stengers 2000: 144)*

*To the shame of philosophy, it is not uncommonly alleged of such theory that whatever may be correct in it is in fact invalid in practice. We usually hear this said in an arrogant, disdainful tone, which comes of presuming to use experience to reform reason itself in the very attributes which do it most credit. Such illusory wisdom imagines it can see further and more clearly with its mole-like gaze fixed on experience than with the eyes which were bestowed on a being designed to stand upright to scan the heavens. (Kant 1991: 62-63)*

If we were serious about considering what theory *after* theory might mean then perhaps we should push this notion to its limit: not simply theory after the 1980s indulgence or heyday of high theory—those days when we could afford to think of texts as such with (some say) little concern for real political conditions—and not simply theory today when no one could be said to be anti-theory—both because theory has been thoroughly assimilated and because what is left remains a toothless tiger, legitimating all sorts of positivisms and moralisms. (Evidence for assimilation is everywhere: no monograph in literary studies appears without some cursory footnote to a theoretical concept; no undergraduate education proceeds without some basic overview of 'feminism,' 'post-colonialism,' and 'post-structuralism'; and no graduate student would be advised to avoid theory altogether.) More often than not, being 'after theory' signals nothing more than that one is aware of some textual mediating condition: there is no sex in itself, race in itself, history in itself. This contemporary theoretical astuteness, consisting of acknowledging the provisional status of one's position, then allows for local attention to minute particulars without any consideration of the problems, possibilities and impossibilities of reading as such. The new historicism that supposedly emerged after theory allows for a mode of positivism justified by an avoidance of grand narratives (Gallagher and Greenblatt 2001: 6). Other modes of theory—queer theory, race studies, gender studies, disability studies, digital media studies—seem to be theoretical not so much by a distinct mode of reading but because of a choice of a marginal object. If anything 'theory' as it is now practiced—with its emphasis on the lived, bodies, multitudes, emotions, affects, the political, the ethical turn—is indeed *practiced*; it avoids the problem of theory—what we can say there is, or the limits of existence—by grounding itself in what one ought to do. Recently, and in line with the ebb and flow of critical trends, there has been an anti-anti-theory reaction, ranging from a general contestation of historical and cultural locatedness (or, in Felski's words, 'context stinks') to a profound and wholesale rejection of the Kantian Copernican turn, or the idea that we can only know and legitimately theorize the world *as it is given* (Felski 2011; Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011). Quentin Meillassoux argues that it is the Kantian turn, or refusal to know that which cannot be experienced by us, that closes philosophy off from the truth of contingency—and crucial to that thought of contingency would be the imperative to think of the world *not* as it is given to us, including geological statements about deep time and logico-philosophical claims about contingency (Meillassoux 2008). Increasingly the general claims of speculative realism—or the insistence to overcome the Kantian enclosure within the bounds of the subject—seem both to resonate *and*  jar with broader cultural imperatives. On the one hand, there is an efflorescence of cultural production devoted to imagining a world without humans, beyond human viewing (broadly evidenced in post-apocalyptic film and literature); and on the other, and often from within philosophy or 'theory after theory,' there is a retrieval of the world only as it appears and only insofar as it is a lived world *for* some being (what one might refer to as the 'naturalist' turn [Petitot et. al. 1999]). The Kantian conception of theory and its project of self-limitation, despite recent refusals of Kantian finitude, help us make sense of this twin tendency to leap beyond human limits and yet remain restricted to the lived. Although Kant does insist that we can only have scientific knowledge about that which can be experienced *as given* this does allow for a mode of scientific realism, for it also encompasses that there are also—beyond the given—the forces from which the given is given to us. What has occurred, since Kant, is an increasing rejection of an 'in itself ' beyond the given, and yet such a gap should perhaps be thought today—not in order to repair or close the distance that separates us from the world, but to heighten both our nonknowledge *and* the imperative to think (but not experience) that which cannot be known.

Theory, if it is *critical* in the Kantian sense, would need to begin from Kant's distinction between theoretical knowledge, concerning objects about which we can speak because they are given *to us*, and practice, which follows from the absence of knowledge about ourselves. Lacking anything objective or experienced that might give us a moral law we are left without foundation. It is because we only know what is given—even if 'the given' can go beyond the *human* eye to include all the apparatuses through which humans image and project a world—that a strong scientific realism also creates a unique gap between theory and practice (Langton 1998). Theory is an acceptance of a distinction between a strong sense of the *in*human (that which exists beyond, beyond all givennness and imaging, and beyond all relations) and an *un*founded imperative that we must therefore give ourselves a law. We act in the absence of knowledge of the world beyond us, and yet knowing *that* there is a beyond means that practice cannot be reduced to what we know or feel; nothing we know can ground or determine our decisions. There is a direct passage from the gap of the undecidable (or that decisions are not made for us because we do not and cannot know any ultimate ground) to the burden of having to make a decision. Human feeling, or 'the lived,' does not exhaust what there is. Theory follows from being exposed to a world that is *not* ourselves; theoretical knowledge is directed to something that is only given through relations but is also not exhausted by the relations through which it is given. In many respects theory, far from being an academic enterprise that we can no longer afford to indulge, is the condition and challenge of the twenty-first century or age of extinction: 'we' are finally sensing both our finitude as a world-forming and world-destroying species, *and* sensing that whatever we must do or think cannot be confined or dictated by our finitude. Theory reminds us both of the givenness of the world, or that what we know is given to us in some specific way, at the same time as this knowledge and relation exceed us. Theory is at once necessary and impossible, just as its 'relation' to practice is necessary and impossible. Theory, or distance from the real, is necessary: 'we' are faced with an existing world that, precisely because it *exists*, is not ourselves; without that 'outside' world there could be no inner subject, no 'we,' no agent of practice. But this existing world to which we are definitively bound is therefore impossible: the given world is given *to* us, never known absolutely. We are not paralyzed by this distance from the world, for it is the distance that provokes both knowledge and practice (Stengers 2011); but the distance nevertheless entails that practice cannot form the ground for our knowledge ('do what works') nor can knowledge ground practice ('act according to your nature'). To avoid theory and pass directly to practice would require forgetting that the self of practice is only a self insofar as it is placed in a position of necessary not-knowing. Recent forms of Kantianism that conclude from this separation that there is an inevitable ideal of humanity and human normativity (Korsgaard 2009; Korsgaard and Cohen 1996) focus all too easily on the practical side of reasoning—whereby the absence of knowledge forces us to be self-governing—and forget too happily the theoretical problem. This self that gives the law to itself is necessarily exposed to a domain which it must theorize but can never grasp as such. To remain with the theoretical challenge, or accepting the distance from the world as it would be without us, is to face up to the formal problem of extinction. There was a time, and there will be a time, without humans: this provides us with a challenge both to think beyond the world as it is *for us*, and yet remain mindful that the imagining of the inhuman world always proceeds from a positive human failure. There would be two senses in which theory would fail. The first sense of failure is necessary and critical: one must at one and the same time be placed in relation to an existence that is never given as such, and it is this world of necessarily given but distanced existence within which we act. (In an era of encroaching extinction this failing theoretical condition becomes a forceful practical problem precisely because we are obliged, practically, to think not only about the unknowable but also the unimaginable. The world we inhabit is becoming increasingly impossible to know and imagine.) The second sense in which theory fails occurs with its seeming triumph; today, if theory has taken institutional hold it has done so by failing to be theoretical; in various modes of theory after theory, where we have returned to life, affect or 'the lived,' theory feels no qualms about the limits of imagination. Indeed, theory *as* imagination allows 'us' to affirm humanity, the lived, meaning, community, the future and life—precisely when the incoherence of these terms should block any easy praxis.

Symptomatic of this failure of theory (via institutionalization) is theory's complete success, and this can be gauged by considering what is now no longer possible: anti-theory. In the early days of theory to be opposed to theory was to be opposed to textualism; it was to insist that 'everyone knows' that for all intents and practical purposes texts mean what we want them to mean. Theory, by contrast, detached texts from a 'wanting to mean.' Such a distinction is evident in the grand debates of the 1980s, including Derrida's skirmish with John Searle, the latter insisting that context would ground utterances (Derrida 1988). But that Searlean attention to context and practice—the position that was once anti-theory—is today the hallmark of theory, both the theory that still remains of historicism and the newer waves of anti-textualism that affirm life, things, history, intent and bodies.

In 1982 Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels published 'Against Theory' in *Critical Inquiry* and posed the following thought experiment. Imagine encountering the marks 'a slumber did my spirit steal,' drawn in the sand on the beach; the marks appear to be drawn (by, one assumes, a human) but then a subsequent wave flows and recedes and leaves the rest of Wordsworth's poem. This, the authors argue, at first seems to present intention-less meaning, but this is not so. Once we *read* we attribute intention; any of those supposedly detached, non-referential objects of theory—texts without context, readers or authors—are proven (Michaels and Knapp claim) to be impossible. If something can be read then it has meaning, and therefore intention. What such an insistence precludes is that something might be read, and not be actively or meaningfully inscribed: a geologist 'reading' the earth's layers would not be reading in Knapp and Michaels's sense, and it follows that it would be a mistake to 'read' texts in the way that one might read scars on the earth's surface or fMRI images. One would, supposedly, need to distinguish between reading—seeing the lines waves leave on the shore and discerning some pattern—and reading, where one posits someone who meant to leave marks in just this way in order to say something to someone. It seems such a distinction is easy, but is it? Imagine we find, some hundreds of years from now, remnants of a wall with spray-painted tagging left behind, and then next to the remnant tags would be some paint that fell onto the wall accidentally, and then next to that would be a city-funded community artist's mural. Cities today are made up of such human-inhuman couplings, where graffiti mixes with staining, with randomly posted notices as well as scars from wreckage, damage and animal and technical marking. Knapp and Michaels would claim that our capacity to read marks such as a mural follows from author's meaning: if there were not an author who had painted the work there would be nothing to be read. Other marks, like 'tagging,' one assumes, could also be read—as forms of signature. Random paint stains might indicate that someone or something had existed but—like the natural marks and wear on a wall could not be read. And yet it is just this hybrid assemblage of marks, stains, signs, tears, human-animal-technical inscriptions that comprises *any* archive: how does one look back and decide to read what was left by a hand, and not read or avoid reading what occurred through inhuman and random processes? For Knapp and Michaels one can distinguish clearly between the rogue methods of theory, that willfully detaches texts from intent-meaning, and reading that relies on texts having a sense which is what an author *wanted to say, and what we must assume he or she wanted to say* for that is what it is to read.

Benn Michaels felt this point still had relevance in 2001 in his 'The Shape of the Signifier,' which was, again symptomatically, an appeal to *the political*. Reading and texts go together to yield intentions and contexts; there are not just signs as such, mere markers of ostensive identity, but historically sedimented and meaningful intentions. In a recent review in *The London Review of Books* Benn Michaels insists again that identity itself cannot bear significance; it makes no sense to say—for example that race *means* something or anything, for one reads such markers only because of socio-economic and historical semantic horizons. One would not 'read' a body as being of a certain identity, unless that body were located in a broader network of human and meaningful sense. The very markers that allow us to read identity presuppose some understanding of a common humanity that is unfairly differentiated (Benn Michaels 2009). Whereas Knapp and Michaels could articulate this insistence on the necessarily contextual and political production of meaning as an argument 'against' theory in the 1980s, Benn Michaels's position is now exemplary of what counts *as theory.* That is, theory is just this attention to the human, intentional and interested ground of the emergence of texts. This is what theory is and ought to be. What was once anti-theory—a reaction against the detachment of texts from any supposition of humanity or meaning—is now so mainstream, that the same argument can be rehearsed and become central to a defense of theory 'after theory.'

Theory 'today' is not an acceptance—as it once was, or might have been—that we do not know the political or the practical and that what we are given as objects of theory are both inhuman *and* can be considered rigorously only with something like an extinction hypothesis. But theory, if it takes on the impossibility that is its twenty-first century potential, might be imagined as a radical de-contextualization. Let us not fall too readily into assuming the human, or assuming 'our' intentional presence behind texts; let us short-circuit 'man's' continuing readability of himself in the context of texts *and* his reflexive mode of judgment whereby he sees marks drawn in the sand and immediately recognizes his own inescapable will.

Theory *after* theory might take a more robust form whereby we consider what it might be to think in the absence of theoria. What would be left without the distanced gaze that the thinking human animal directs towards the world? An absence of the look or point of view of theory could take two forms, one of which (I would suggest) is dominant in whatever remains of theory today, and another that represses theory. The first mode was articulated by Hannah Arendt in *The Promise of Politics.*  Politics—being in common, speaking in common, living as a multitude—has always been repressed, Arendt argues, since Plato at least, and has been subjected to the ideal of *bios theoritikos* (Arendt 2005: 85)*.* The contempt for labor and for the multitude has meant that political philosophy has always been oriented towards contemplation rather than action, a privileging of theoria over praxis.

[S]ince Socrates, no man of action, that is, nobody whose original experience was political, as for instance Cicero's was, could ever hope to be taken seriously by the philosophers […] Political philosophy never recovered from this blow dealt by philosophy to politics at the very beginning of our tradition. The contempt for politics, the conviction that political activity is a necessary evil, due partly to the necessities of life that force men to live as labourers or rule over slaves who provide for them, and partly to the evils that come from living together itself, that is, to the fact that the multitude, which the Greeks called *hoi polloi,* threatens the security and even the existence of every individual person, runs like a thread throughout the centuries that separate Plato from the modern age. (Arendt 2005: 83-84)

Since Arendt that targeting of theoria for the sake of life and praxis has intensified, particularly in the work of those whose redemptive *political*  theory has seemed to save theory from the cartoon characterizations that consigned the irresponsibly formalist and textualist modes of 'French' thought to a past that was not yet properly attuned to the politics of life. I will consider this retrieval or saving of theory later. For now I want to suggest that there might be another, diametrically opposed, sense of theory *after* theory. This would not be a return of theory to life, and certainly not a return of theory to the body, to affects, to living systems, living labor or praxis. One could create an exhaustive and exhausting list of all the ways in which theory has been re-territorialized back onto the lived, all the ways in which a radical consideration of force without center, without life, without intention or sense is continually relocated in practical life, in *doing.* One diagnostic point, for example, would concern the migration of certain terms, such as 'performativity,' or 'difference,' which harbor the potential to think an act without an actor, but which have actually operated to reinforce the practices of self-formation. Although Judith Butler insists on there being 'no doer behind the deed' in her theory of performativity (Butler 1993: 142) one might observe that performance was nevertheless for Butler that which, ex post facto, produced a body who would recognize itself as human (Butler 2005). This aspect of human recognition, with a specific focus on the face, comes to the fore in her later work (2006). Whereas theory might be approached beginning from estrangement and distance, considering a world that is not ourselves and a force that cannot be returned to the human, theory is moving precisely in the opposite direction to being nothing more than the expression of praxis, nothing more than relations of recognition. Antonio Negri insists that 'living labour' and the self-producing body of 'homo homo humanity squared' opens up a world liberated both from the centralizing exploitation of capitalism *and* freed from any position of knowledge and cognition outside the collective body, and he appeals to the master thinkers of theory (Derrida and Lacan) in order to generate this 'genealogy of vital elements.' How, we might ask, is a Lacan whose corpus was devoted to the necessarily alien and inhuman fact *that there is system,* and a Derrida who began by considering genesis as 'anarchic,' read as modes of vital living expression?

[T]he living expressions of our culture are not born in the form of synthetic figures but, on the contrary, in the form of events; they are untimely. Their becoming is within a genealogy of vital elements that constitute a radical innovation and the very form of the lack of measure. Some contemporary philosophers have set off in pursuit of this new expressive force of postmodernity, and they have attempted to characterize it. Already Lacan had pointed to the absence of measure in the new; for Derrida, the productivity of the margins as it seeks new orders as it disseminates; as for Nancy and Agamben, we find them picking the flowers that grow in these extreme fields. (Negri 2008: 66-67)

This joyous affirmation of the living, of the multitude, of productivity, of the other, or of pure potentiality and futurity is but one way of reading theory. But is this the best mode of thinking and reading when we are at a moment when there is no shortage of information about life and its temporality—no shortage of data bombarding us daily with the inevitable end of the human organism—and yet are all the more insistent that whatever else it is thinking and theory are primarily organic? Does not one of theory's earliest gestures towards a force without production, or a potentiality without actuality or presence, at least suggest that one might consider relations beyond life and creation? How would theory confront the absence of theoria: 'life' without the human look? Life without praxis, life without meaningful action, life without production or labour: such would be theory *after* theory, or theory that opened itself to the thought of extinction. Hints of such a theory were articulated at theory's very genesis: not only explicitly in texts such as Derrida's 'No Apocalypse, Not Now: Seven Missiles, Seven Missives' (1984) or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's suggestion that one might need to think of the world beyond or before the gaze of the organism ('becoming-imperceptible'), but also in theory's most scandalously 'apolitical' moments, such as Paul De Man's suggestion that theory begins when one reads a text as if there were no readers, no contextual life that would be its site of emergence, and no living horizon that might maintain or animate its sense (De Man 1972). More recently, hints of a surviving or nascent theory occur in extensions of Alain Badiou's promising 'theoretical antihumanism' that push theory beyond Badiou's own decision of the subject (Badiou 2001: 5). Ray Brassier (2008) takes up Badiou's antihumanism, along with Quentin Meillassoux's insistence that it is possible to think beyond human knowledge (Meillassoux 2008), to move further into a world without cognition. Graham Harman has also taken up phenomenology, *not* to insist that the world as given is always given *to* some subject or body, but to demand that we think of relations of givenness beyond self-present thinking (Harman 2005). Despite the fact that Kantian philosophy defines 'theory' as that which is given to a necessarily presupposed subject, we might say that these gestures are theoretical insofar as they begin from what is not immediately present to a subject of action.

One might want to go further than these suggestions from within philosophy to consider what *literary* theory might offer to a present that is dominated by information calculating the end of time, alongside a range of cultural productions striving to witness such an end—however paradoxical such an end might be. That is: how would theory approach the influx of data regarding irreversible threats to the human species—an onslaught of evidence that is met at one and the same time by increasing climate change denial, a resurgence in 'theories' of human praxis, and a widespread cultural production that intimates the end of human life? How would a theory that was *literary—*or that considered the remnants of the letter—'read' the spate of films of the last decade or more that have been witnessing the possible end of all human life? Such films include, especially, redemption narratives where the potential extinction of the species is averted by a popular or ecological victory over techno-science: James Cameron's *Avatar* (2009) would be the most recent example. But for all their redemptive and re-humanizing work, post-apocalyptic films and novels also open up the thought of literary theory, where the 'literary' would signal something like Benn and Michaels's enigmatically inhuman traces. One can think here of texts as remaining, unread, dead objects without authors or audience. Would readers fifty or one hundred years from now who found random copies of *Glamorama* or *Finnegans Wake* be secure in attributing intent and meaning, or would not such texts be more likely encountered as marks or traces without animating hand? A literary theory would not assume that texts or letters were the work of a living body, and yet would be theoretical as well as literary in asking what sort of reading, viewing or look such texts or marks might open. Imagine a species, after humans, 'reading' our planet and its archive: if they encounter human texts (ranging from books, to machines to fossil records) how might new views or theories open up? Such a literary theory would not, as Derrida suggested concerning literature, be an opening to democracy insofar as literature is a right to 'say anything' (Derrida 1997: 58). Rather the 'text' would operate as an 'anarchic genesis' or 'mal d'archive': a force or disturbance not felt by the organism but witnessed after the event in its having always already occurred.

Leaving those suggestions aside for now, I want to begin by addressing the question of why such a strong sense of theory after theory ought to be entertained. First: one might consider the current terrain of theory as a reaction formation. In response to a world in which 'the political' is increasingly divorced from meaningful practice (whatever that would be) theory has insisted in ever more shrill tones on the grounding of theoria in meaningful, practical, productive and human-organic life. Second: our context or life is one in which a radical sense of '*after* theory'—the non-existence of thinking beings—is all too obvious, despite the fact that the one area theory has failed to address is what it might mean in this (literally posthuman, or after-human) sense to be 'after theory.' That is, one might ask why it is just as the world faces its annihilation, or at least the annihilation of something like the organic life that was capable of *bios theoretikos,* that 'theory' turns back towards productive embodied and affective life? Third: if popular culture is dominated by a genuinely post-theoretical meditation—by a constant, obsessive and fraught imagination of a life or non-life beyond the gaze of the organism, and by the literal image of extinction—why is this the one mode of post-theory that 'theory' has failed to consider?

The twentieth century witnessed several waves of extinction threat or catastrophic risks coming in various modes with various temporal intensities: the sudden nuclear annihilation of the cold war was perhaps the only potential extinction threat that has abated. Sudden nuclear catastrophe is perhaps the only event that would produce apocalyptic annihilation; all other possible extinctions would be gradual, allowing for a minimal 'human' presence to witness the slow and violent departure of the human. Indeed, two of the senses of post-apocalyptic lie in this indication that there will not be complete annihilation but a gradual witnessing of a slow end, and that we are already at that moment of witness, living on after the end. Indeed, this is what an ethics of extinction requires: not an apocalyptic thought of the 'beyond the human' as a radical break or dissolution, but a slow, dim, barely discerned and yet violently effective destruction. Since the cold war, other threats to human species survival have succeeded each other with the public imagination being turned now to one human extermination menace, now to another. It is almost as though there is a global and temporally myopic attention deficit disorder: we can imagine as other and as 'our' end only one threat at a time. If post-9/11 culture seemed gripped by the threat of terror, then more recent fears of systemic economic collapse have overtaken the focus on the war on terror. One might note that although the threat of AIDS—the initial figuration of which was highly apocalyptic—has hardly gone away, little mention was made of viral disaster once other concerns such as climate change began to attract attention. After 9/11 and the shift from a war on drugs to a war on terror, various viral disasters have deflected 'attention' from bio-weapons, nuclear arsenals and suicide bombers, 'focusing' instead on SARS, bird flu and the H1N1 virus. Interspersed among those surges of panic have been waves of other threats (including the threat of panic itself, for it may be the case that it is the fear and chaos of terrorism and viral pandemic that pushes the system into annihilating disorder). Before the financial meltdown of late 2008 the 'era of cheap food' came to an end (due partly to the shift in production towards bio-fuels), with food riots in Haiti presaging intense global aggression from the hungry. This was eclipsed by waves of lawlessness and violence that followed the stringencies caused by economic chaos, which in turn would lead to a fear of disorder that would be both precipitated by diminishing resources while also exacerbating the increasing fragility and incompetence of systems of social order that would suffer from widespread uncertainty and confusion.

These terrors—viral, political, economic, climactic and affective have not failed to dent the cultural imaginary. In addition to quite explicit texts about viral disaster, from *Outbreak* (1995) to the more recent *The Invasion* (2007)*, 28 Days Later* (2002), 28 *Weeks Later* (2007) and *Contagion* (2011)*,* other disaster epics have focused on spectacular catastrophes prompted by global warming (including Danny Boyle's *Sunshine*  in which a space mission to reignite the dying sun is thwarted when the space travelers fail to resist the desire to stare directly at the source of the light that would have saved the earth, so drawn are they to light's blinding intensity). Like *The Invasion* in which humans are infected by a virus that robs them of all affect and thus annuls their capacity for violence and emotion, fiction and documentary culture have repeatedly asked the question that theory has failed to ask: why should the human species wish for or justify its prolongation, and what would be worth saving? (Exceptions to this investigation of species-worthiness would be David Benatar's *Better Never to Have Been* (2006), Thomas Ligotti's *The Conspiracy Against the Human Race* (2010), and Ray Brassier's far more questioning *Nihil Unbound* (2009).) But beyond asking the worth of the species, we might ask why and how such questions are both possible (given that they are implied in so much contemporary fiction) and yet impossible, given that the human species seems to have defined itself as a will to survive? How might the human race imagine its non-existence, and how would we humans of the present adopt a relation to those whose miserable future will be 'our' legacy? (In *The Day After Tomorrow* (2004) survivors taking refuge in the frozen-over New York Public Library decide not to burn the works of Nietzsche, choosing an economics text book for some final warmth.) Other texts have passed judgment on a self-extinguishing humanity, with the recent remake of *The Day the Earth Stood Still* (2008) featuring a dead-pan Keanu Reeves informing humanity that it has no right to live given the waste and violence of its history. Such worlds are *after theory* in a quite banal and literal sense. There are no theorists.

This era of theory after theory has been considered by 'theory,' if at all, either in the mode of mournful despair (by an Agamben who wishes to retrieve the political in the face of the hedonism of spectacle) or rehumanizing emancipation, (by a Hardt and Negri who regard liberation from any external point of judgment as the consequence of living labor no longer subjected to spatial fragmentation or material production). These new trends in theory are accompanied by a series of returns or relocations of the previous generation of thinkers to their less threatening philosophical fathers. Derrida is returned to Husserl in order to avoid the radically disembodied and inhuman forces of writing; Deleuze and Guattari are returned to Bergson in order to re-affirm the boundaries of the organism; the machinic potentials of digital media are located in the bodies of meaning-generating audiences (Hansen 2000; Hansen 2003; Hansen 2004). A Merleau-Ponty whose concept of 'flesh' bore the possibility of taking the body and even 'life' beyond the sense of the lived has, for theorists of biopolitics, become a way of positing vital norms (Esposito 2008) or, even more alarmingly, a re-grounding of thought on embodiment (Gallagher 2005).

More specifically still: if theory after theory has any meaning, should it not refer to a hyperbolic *and* minimal theoretical condition in which we consider not simply the formal absence of a population but an actual disappearance? Theory is constitutively distinct from practice precisely because theory relates to that which is not ourselves; theory is the consideration of that which is given to us (while practice is the law one gives to oneself in the absence of knowledge). Hyperbolically, then, theory ought to relate to cultural production *not* in terms of bodies, affects, multitudes and identities, unless these too were also considered not as self-evidently familiar and living but as strangely dead to us. This would also give us a minimal approach to an ethics of extinction, which would also be a counter-ethics. We would not assume an ethos, a proper way of being, community, 'we' or humanity that would be the ground and value of literary or other objects. Just as Foucault's counter-memory sought to consider all those forces that had some power in the present but were not present to living history (Foucault 1977), a counter-ethics would be theoretical in beginning from the condition of the present—looming extinction without assuming the ethos of the present. That is, one would—as the world after theory ought to compel us to do—consider what is worthy of concern or survival, what of the human, the multitude, or the living would enable an ethos that was not the ethos of the present.

We can return again to the question of theory after theory, today, and ask why it has so focused on an empty tomorrow—a future of open creativity, and unbounded possibility—that it has not considered the tomorrow of its own non-existence. Given even the minimal assumption that reading theoretically requires some necessary distance from any actual audience, and given the now-literal threat of the absence of the human species, why has theory survived, after theory, in a mode of increasing humanization and organicism? Why, when events and timelines would seem to demand just the contrary, does theory takes its current self-englobing form? As an example of the ways in which theory has, just as Arendt suggested it ought to do, retrieved a politics of living in common (a polity of the multitude with no outside), we might consider three dominants. First, a deconstruction that now mourns Derrida does so precisely by insisting on a dimension of deconstruction oriented towards hospitality (Royle 2009: 137), and towards a future whose radical openness defies all calculation (saving justice and democracy to come) (Naas 2008: 67-68). Such a mode of deconstruction would survive at the expense of a Derrida who suggested an 'untamed genesis' that would be neither living nor dead, neither before nor after the human but nevertheless disruptive of any mode of good conscience. Second, a turn to life or naturalism insists that the world is always the world for this or that living system, always embedded in a milieu given as a range of affordances: this ranges from the retrieval of phenomenology and the embedding of mind in life (Petito, Varela, Pachoud and Roy 1999) *against* an anti-organicism or textualism that would draw attention to forces beyond the lived, to the celebration of bio-political production and the multitude against a bio-power that is seen as extrinsic and opposed to life (Hardt and Negri 2000). Finally, one might cite a return to the aesthetic, whether that be an aesthetics of language that separates man as a speaking being who gives himself his world from animality (Agamben 2004), to a reaffirmation of literature ( Joughin and Malpas 2003; Attridge 2004) or art in general as grounded in the human organism's sense-making capacities of its world. It would be far too obvious to add to this list the affirmations of identity politics or, worse, subjectivity, that would posit a self that is nothing more than the negation of a world in itself (knowable, measurable and presentable) precisely because the subject is that which gives a world, law and norm to itself.

Theory might have both interest and worth—if we accept the thorough contingency of such worth—only if it is as destructive of the imagination as our milieu of possible extinction allows. We might need to abandon the grounding of ecology on nature (Morton 2007) or consider modes of deconstruction in which the future were not radically open, hospitable and affirmative (Clark 2010). There is no shortage of data regarding the possible or inevitable absence of humans: terror threats are calculated meticulously by government think tanks; climate change protocols and negotiations require detailed prediction and scenario plotting, and popular news is dominated by economic, climactic, viral and political 'updates' regarding a range of intruding violences (Grusin 2010). Such information, far from indicating the location of texts in a polity, suggests just the sort of approach deemed to be horrifically absurd in Knapp and Benn Michaels's miserable summation of theory. Let us imagine texts as lines drawn without any preceding or ideal community. Let us also, more importantly, be aware (insofar as we can) that the text of the current 'multitude' includes information regarding climate change, terror, destruction and extinction expressed in a vocabulary of mitigation, adaptation, viability policy and sustainability, none of which can figure the non-existence of the human. If theory were to operate as it might then it would be destructive of such an imaginary; it would be theory after theory.

#### *Chapter 2*

# **The Sustainability of Concepts: Knowledge and Human Interests**

Climate change studies—a burgeoning field prompted by government research initiatives and academic opportunism as much as by the impending crises associated with global warming and resource depletion—is, in general, formed by combining the 'hard' sciences (geography, geology, physics, biochemistry, biology and genetics) with the social sciences (geography again, psychology, political science, demographics, sociology and economics). As a consequence of most major research institutions having produced some type of climate change research network the humanities, too, are beginning to contribute to understandings of the problems presented by climate change. Before considering why any simple *inclusion* of the humanities in climate change studies needs to be questioned, I would like to open a series of considerations.

First, the combinations of the hard sciences and human sciences that make up climate change studies—even though *inter*disciplinary research networks bring these sciences together—keep the disciplinary borders of various fields in place. There are, of course, some sciences—geography, psychology—that are in part both hard and social sciences, but even this division within the subject presupposes something like the idea of a *human science.* That disciplinary distinction, as Michel Foucault argued in *The Order of Things,* is not simply a division of labour that takes a single subject such as nineteenth-century natural history and then divides the same practices of gathering information into different disciplines: what counts as true or false alters dramatically, with the very idea of a distinction between hard science and social or human science creating 'man' as a distinct object of knowledge (Foucault 1970). Foucault argues, for example, that we cannot see natural history as simply preceding biology or the science of life. Nor can we read Adam Smith's theory of wealth as leading seamlessly to economics; nor can we see theories of grammar as similar in type to the social science of linguistics.

To understand how these new disciplinary distinctions create a curious new object of knowledge—man—we can take our lead from the present. Even popular economic theories, such as *Freakanomics* (Levitt and Dubner 2005)*,* or the Chicago school theories that directly influence government policy (Overtveldt 2007) presuppose a certain concept of man. Either—as *Freakanomics* theories posit—we constantly miscalculate the effects that our 'choices' will have on our well-being (by being lured into paying more for our daily coffee if only we can be seduced by a special offer that will create a habit); or, we are naturally competitive and self-interested animals who, if left to themselves, will allow the most efficient players to rise to the top while the muddling remainder of the population can benefit from economic prosperity in general. What economics as a social science assumes is a 'subject of interests' (Montag 2009): it is not sufficient just to look at relations among goods and prices but also to have some notion of human behavior, especially if the operations of human behavior are not immediately apparent to humans themselves.

Questioning the extent to which capitalism presupposes normative concepts of the self is hardly new. C.B. Macpherson's 1962 classic theory of possessive individualism is perhaps now widely accepted, with the concepts of the free individual or the level playing field now recognized as being barely veiled assertions of liberal market norms. What is slightly more nuanced, and not so widely acknowledged, is not the critique of liberal normativity but the shift from the normative to the normal. If behavior is based not so much on (even implicit) regulatory ideals regarding the proper life that one ought to live, but more on some preceding and determining *life,* then the mode of decision or axiology shifts from selfdetermination to alignment—bringing human existence into accord with the life of which it is an expression. We tend to explain human actions by appealing to some prior logic of life from which they emerge. There is a shift from assessing human action according to its manifest sense to regarding 'man' as a strangely doubled animal who is the outcome of a longer history of life processes that he can only dimly discern. And yet man is also able to read and interpret the life of which he is an effect. In this respect certain historical theses—ranging from MacPherson's claim that the supposed neutral individual of capitalism is in fact the outcome of a specific politico-economic historical period, or Louis Dumont's argument that modern *homo economicus* needs to be explained anthropologically—rely on some ultimate horizon (history, anthropology) that would gather and explain human positivity. Foucault (1970) agued that Adam Smith's *Wealth of Nations* of 1776 explained how human interaction produced commodities, how these could be exchanged, and how a system of circulating goods produced an overall stability and system that benefited all concerned (Smith 1976). When Karl Marx forms a theory of labor the life or species being of the human animal is added to the way questions are posed: why, we might ask, do human beings labor and enter into exchange? For Marx the answer presupposed *man'*s species being: we must labor, collectively and with the help of technology, in order to meet our needs. This, in turn, explains the existence of ideology for there are forces that determine the relations we establish to each other—forces of production that place some bodies in greater servitude to production than others. The very concept of ideology in its Marxist sense—not what we believe but belief as grounded in a preceding and hidden life—relies upon situating the human species in a collective history that originates from an initially life-serving aim. These initial forces determine our social being, even if they are not directly experienced, and are capable of being interpreted only after the fact. Marx's theory of ideology, in a manner shared by social or human sciences more generally, relies upon *interpreting* the way in which we live our social relations: what we experience as natural—that I go to work for an employer who pays me for my time needs to be understood as the outcome of a historical process whereby those in command of the means of production that will ultimately reduce human effort (factory owners, for example) are capable of buying the labor of other individuals from whom they profit (Foucault 1970, 257). The human sciences, such as economics, do not just chart the circulation of goods (as did Adam Smith's theory of wealth) they presuppose something like human interests that can explain systems of exchange.

Second, this production of 'man' in the human sciences would also yield the possibility of the humanities. Not only would we have social sciences looking at the mechanisms of 'life, labour and language' (Foucault 1970, 345) through which social systems are effected, we can also have humanities disciplines that would be interpretive in their examination of human cultural production, and would also presuppose 'man' as an historical, social and productive animal. Anyone working in a literature department today may well recognize that Foucault's notion of literature—a mode of human production *not* grounded in purposiveness or a theory of human function—has well and truly been overtaken by logics grounded on a normalizing theory of man, whether that be a theory of literature as ideology (allowing for smooth social functioning and the reproduction of capitalist social relations) or a theory of narrative and story-telling as a human survival mechanism (or so literary Darwinism would claim). Foucault, referring to the knowledge practices of his own day, was critical of some of the key discourses that made up the humanities, such as phenomenology, structuralism and psychoanalysis (Foucault 1970, 355). These approaches would examine cultural production while presupposing what Foucault referred to as man as an 'empirical-transcendental' double. Man is empirical—a being whose language, social relations and bodily habits are determined by the material relations he must take up in relation to his environment and others; but man is also a being who can analyze those material forces and thereby 'read' the ways in which he has come to be the specific social being that he is. Psychoanalysis, for example, will argue that we can only exist and live if our desires take on some acceptable, socially-sanctioned form; we can, however, always read these socialized forms to discern something like *desire as such*. (Other less humanizing or organic forms of psychoanalysis would not ground desire in the function of man as a social animal, but Foucault's target was a psychological form of psychoanalysis, one grounded on a desire that would be explicable according to the human animal as a self-furthering and survival-oriented being). Phenomenology, also, insists that we exist only insofar as we make sense of ourselves and our world; we need to see all that we do—from daily habits to great artworks—as a mode of worldproduction. Structuralism, too, regards language, culture and social relations as a product of a transcendental need for ordering: the specific forms of social ordering are empirical (or to do with how this or that social formation comes into existence); but the requirement that there be some mode of ordering is necessary or transcendental—characterizing any and every culture.

We can pause and look at how these first two considerations—both involving normalizing theories of man—open up questions for climate change studies. For it is not just that we address questions of climate on the basis of certain values, including assumptions regarding market viability and social fairness; it is also the case that we adopt normalizing forms of reasoning and calculation, both assuming that individuals may act more benevolently towards the climate (and future others) if narratives can be formed that are sympathetic and coherent, and that the values of survival and the future are shared by all humans here and now. There is also division of labor between the predictive hard sciences concerned with climate change research and data, and the interpretive projects of the humanities.

How does the distinction between the physical sciences and moral sciences not only alter the way we approach climate change (as something with a physical base that may affect different humans differently) but produce the very concepts through which we think about ways of tackling climate change? First, as long as we assume something like the possibility of a social science, in its distinction from hard sciences, we will not only have a bifurcation between data (such as the evidence yielded by the earth sciences for global warming) and social impact (such as the work done by social geographers who gauge how gender, class and race produce disproportionate and unequal impacts of climate change); we also presuppose a subject of interests. That is, it is assumed that there is a physical world of material forces and constraints and that this physical world is the milieu, environment or climate within which we are located. The concept of *climate* may be the most telling of all, deriving from concepts of surface and habitation, when in fact what 'climate change' indicates is that there is not a distinct milieu that we can observe and manage but a mesh of overlapping, divergent, interconnected and dispersed systems with certain factors such as clouds and even human hope itself, operating in two directions at once: too much hope and we don't act, not enough hope and we don't act; clouds may both increase and lessen global warming, trapping or deflecting. But rather than consider the dispersed, diverging, multiple and incongruent forces of multiple planes (where economics, politics, technology, knowledge and industry operate by divergent timelines and logics) the concept of climate reinforces the sense of 'a' milieu or habitus. *Climate change* would therefore refer to a material and physical locale that may be treated as material resource for goods and data (by the physical sciences) or as a restraining and determining condition that will alter how we produce our world and our polity (by the human sciences). The word 'climate' originally refers to a specific region, indicating different modes of human life, but once we refer to 'climate change' and have something like *the climate,* we also generate the concept of something like humanity in general. That is, if we now have something that is not a specific 'clime' or territory but a single condition for all living beings then there is also something like a general concept of life that comes to be threatened.

Second, this leads to the specific possibility of the humanities. This possibility might seem, at first glance, to produce something quite distinct from either the physical being of the hard sciences or the social systems of the human sciences. If political theory, economics and sociology can examine the impacts of climate change and climate change policy on different nations, social groups, ethnicities and gender—and if these social sciences can also explain non-physical aspects of climate change, such as the needs of developing nations and peoples to maximize production without being able to afford strategies of mitigation what they cannot do is examine the meaning of climate change: how it is lived by 'us' and what modes of understanding and cultural production led to climate catastrophe and disdain for the environment upon which we depend and which also produces us as the beings that we are. This is where the humanities may, and has, entered climate change studies. One might even argue that the humanities has *always* taken the form of climate change studies: has always asked what humanity or 'the human' *is* such that it may have come to treat its own milieu as so much raw material for profit, consumption and energy maximization and not as a body worthy of care. The humanities, we might say, has always considered the earth as climate or environment—the home of our being, or our unavoidable terrain and surround—and never as mere stuff, matter or potential energy. The humanities originates both in a unified sense of the human, *and* in a commitment to the cultural, historical and textual variability of humanity across time and space. In a humanizing mission, reacting to the disenchantment of the world by the supposed 'hard' sciences, the humanities open a space for human variability. This humanizing motif occurs as early as the first formulations of English Studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concerned to develop a moral framework in an increasingly secularized and disenchanted world, and is reiterated—today—in various calls for the humanities to be led by life and praxis against the mechanizations of globalization and capitalism (Baldick 1983; Bérubé and Nelson 1995). By the time the humanities *explicitly* take up these concerns of eco-criticism or environmental philosophy it has a wealth of material to draw upon that would demonstrate that we are, primarily, ecological beings. The humanities could not do without the ecological motif, or the commitment to historical cultural variation across a comparative and meaningful plane. By the time universities form explicit networks for climate change studies there is already a demarcated niche for the humanities: neither assuming the brute facts of the world, nor dealing with humans statistically in the manner of the human sciences, the humanities nevertheless presupposes a ground of life that expresses itself in human self-creation.

On the one hand environmental philosophy—even though generalizing this area covers over many complexities—reacts critically to the fundamental concepts that are deemed to constitute Western metaphysics. The idea that we are self-determining 'subjects' whose relation to the world is one of representation (knowledge) or use (with the world as mere raw material) needs to be supplanted by a relation of care, concern or respect. The humanism and anthropocentrism that have marked Western thought need to give way to a new relation to the environment. This would not be a shift in the value we attribute to the planet and atmosphere that is our home; it would not be a question of valuing the environment *more, or of granting it greater worth, importance or significance.* We would require what Nietzsche referred to as a transvaluation of values (Nietzsche 1968). Rather than generating values on the basis of instrumental reason or utility—rather, that is, than assuming that the worth of an object or action is gauged by how much it furthers our own purposes—we would criticize means/ends rationality. We would not assume that all valid means are justified if they serve to maintain humanity in its current mode. We would, at the very least, consider values *as if from a point of view different from that of 'man.'* This would occur if, for example, we granted non-humans (animals, trees, ecosystems) rights, or if we questioned the concepts of rights and entitlement and instead developed values of mutual care, concern and deep ecological connectedness. On the other hand, while insisting upon the need to alter the very structure of our thought away from instrumental (or use-oriented) and cognitive relations to the world in which we live, eco-criticism has already uncovered an implicit and long-running awareness of a complex relation to nature that might be unearthed in canonical literature (Bate 1991; Bate 2000). Despite a manifest assumption that humans are given the world as so much available property, eco-critical readings can show the ways in which there has always been an awareness that the earth is not mere matter, but an environing and meaningful place that is as much constitutive of our sense of self as we are of the significance it has for us. Again, like environmental philosophy, eco-criticism cannot be reduced to a common set of principles. What can unify both these ways in which the humanities disciplines have anticipated current attempts to approach our climate differently is both their target and some of their key concepts. What is targeted is the notion of human beings as self-sufficient and primarily rational agents whose relation to the world is ideally one of disinterested or disenchanted knowledge; the use of key concepts, ranging from environment and ecology, to the privileging of place over space, along with concepts of care, concern, indebtedness and most importantly *life* also serve to move from a philosophy based on individuals and matter to a mode of thought that is more relational, more sympathetic and ultimately more concerned with meaning. That is to say, there is never a world as such, in itself, that we then have to manage and quantify, for 'we' exist and have a sense of ourselves only insofar as we have a specific place that is always embedded in, and generative of, an entire world of possible futures (which involve other timelines and potentials beyond ourselves).

Perhaps the strongest mode of this critical relation to Western knowledge takes the form of James Lovelock's *Gaia* hypothesis, where he insists that not only is it not a question of taking up a different attitude to nature, it is also imperative that 'nature' no longer be seen as a distinct object that would be more worthy of our care. On the contrary, the Gaia hypothesis presents the world as a single organism, so that human life would not be placed within the world, or in relation to the world, for human life would be just one aspect of an intricate, complex, dynamic, interacting and homeostatic system (Lovelock 1979). The Gaia hypothesis was formulated to challenge conventional ways of thinking about humans and their relation to the environment. It suggests that any adequate response to climate change would require a radical reassessment of our conceptual terrain.

We might, then, consider some of the key terms that orient climate change policy, ranging from 'cap and trade,' adaptation and mitigation to sustainability and viability. These terms remain managerial and instrumental. Cap and trade is, of course, an explicit adoption of a calculative framework. Policy and negotiations focus on a single variable (carbon emissions) despite the volatility and complexity of factors that the physical sciences have consistently demonstrated to make up the problems of climate change. The very notion of *trading* carbon emissions—that as long as a payoff is made somewhere or by someone then further destruction can be sanctioned—not only (again) places human response in the mode of *homo economicus*, it also precludes any genuine thought of the future. If carbon emissions can be managed, traded, and held at 'acceptable' levels then we fail to confront the scientific evidence that indicates that even a halt in current carbon emissions would leave a tailing effect that would continue to wreak havoc; continued trade in emissions presupposes that the future will be different in degree, or a continuation of the present, and not different in kind. There is something anaesthetizing in the idea of *trading* carbon emissions and allowances: as though something like an economy were at work, an enclosed system of more and less, and not—as is becoming apparent—a future that will be unmanageable and have entirely different terms. One might make a similar remark about the concepts of sustainability, adaptation, mitigation and viability. Sustainability assumes the value of continuity: if one changes it is only insofar as is required in order for human life to continue, an implication that is less subtly contained in the strategy of mitigation. Not only do all these terms accept that humanity exists as something that has the right to continue, and that it must do so now only in the mode of damage limitation; they also have a primarily calculative conceptual base (where the calculations are arithmetical, concerning more and less, rather than differential). Climate change is perceived as a problem of disturbance, precluding us from continuing life in the same manner; and it is only for that reason that changes need to be made. Such changes will not be global in the full sense of the word; they will not alter the fundamental or entire system within which we are imbricated. They will rather occur as responses to a predicament. Life may have continued unperturbed—had we been wiser and more cautious, perhaps less profligate and wasteful but unfortunately we plundered nature excessively and with short-term thinking. Our response is therefore to *extend* our calculative approach to the future to include not only our maximal efficiency here and now but our ongoing existence, our sustained existence.

All these terms are aligned with what Gilles Deleuze referred to as extensive multiplicities: certain multiples have their units determined in advance, and are composed of equivalents (Deleuze 1994). In general we might say that the very possibility of the social sciences is built on calculations of extensive multiplicities: in relation to climate change studies one can look at how different members of populations respond to, or are affected by, policies or climatic disasters. More importantly, the timelines take the mode of more or less: what practices do we need to adopt to live longer? How might 'we' adapt? Can we use less? Can we be more like developing nations? How much suffering and sacrifice will be demanded from our future generations? All such questions assume that the future would be a continuing time of *more or less*. Such extensive calculations also presuppose a general underlying substrate—human life—that may vary culturally and historically, that may have to *adapt,*  but will have nevertheless have some mode of continuity. Rather, then, than continue a late Romantic project of re-enchanting the world, following a science of calculation that disenchanted the world, I would suggest that what is required is a more intensified disenchantment and evacuation of meaning, or what Timothy Morton has referred to as an ecology without nature. As long as we regard the world as our lived world, as an organic and meaningful whole that is the milieu of our being then our approach to the future will be bifurcated: split between an increasingly multiple and intensive mode of scientific calculation, concerned with positive and negative feedback loops and multiple timelines, and an englobing environment. In intensive quantities it is not a question of equivalent units of more or less, but of speeds and thresholds that have the capacity to produce differences in kind. Climate change calculations, models and scenarios have long been characterized by quantities that are not those of a single unit (beneficial or detrimental) but will alter in kind and relation depending on speed and quantity; not only are there tipping points (or thresholds where one more degree of heat will alter the entire system) there are also unpredictable feedback effects and incalculable productions of disequilibrium. Had the social sciences taken on a similar complexity they would have to consider the possibility that the units with which they work—humans, societies—would alter in kind, beyond recognition, at certain speeds and thresholds. This could be seen positively, whereby one might say that climate change will not simply disturb human life, requiring it to sustain itself in a more viable manner, but will alter the very unit of 'the human.'

Here, one would have to rethink the very being of 'man' that was produced by the division between hard and social sciences: there could no longer be this animal blessed with language and history, who produces himself socially and technologically, but who can also study and read himself as an object of historical and cultural production. For there would no longer be man (historically and socially determined and determining) but a species tied to rhythms that were geological and beyond the historical and familial imagination. This would require us to consider that the question of the humanities and the human is not something that might be *added* to the problem of climate change, as though the environmental and policy problems could benefit from an examination of some concepts. Here is where we might return to how theories of ecology, environment and—of course—climate as terrain or habitation have already been considered by the humanities. For perhaps what may need to be rethought is the very concept of the human as it subtends the humanities.

Returning to Foucault's genealogy of the emergence of the human sciences in modernity, we can recall that 'man' becomes possible as an object of knowledge only with the strict distinction between the hard sciences of matter, and the social sciences that chart man as a socio-historical cultural production. If we accept that construction of man that is coterminous with a normalizing ground of life, splitting the world into the hard sciences of matter, and then the temporal-cultural expression of man in the social sciences, then it follows that the *discipline* of the humanities forms both an enabling condition and presupposed axiology: for discipline is both a set of conditions of knowledge and an art of formation. In the disciplines of the humanities 'man' not only studies himself as determined, in part, by his climate, for he can also reconfigure his intellectual climate, rewrite his concepts and vocabularies. He can alter himself from within his own history, sustaining himself, and rendering himself more viable by becoming more attuned, more sympathetic, less instrumental in relation to what will always be his climate and his environment. Indeed, in theories such as the Gaia hypothesis, man can project his organic being onto life as a whole. No longer would he be fragmented from a climate that is unfortunately not bending to his will and knowledge; he would, rather, be part of a living form that in its dynamically self-sustaining manner would guide him away from self-seeking politics to a naturally forming politics of the whole. Ethics and politics what 'we' ought to do—would follow directly from the natural and vital norms of the one living earth. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, like any theory that assumes a natural or proper connectedness (however occluded), reinforces what Foucault referred to as the specifically modern nature of bio-power (Foucault 1978), and maintains an extensive and bourgeois approach to values. That is, despite the recognitions of ecology, environment, climate and biosphere, it is man who will read the conditions of this system, discern its proper order, break free from merely instrumental attitudes and arrive at a proper mode of self-regulation.

The alternative to this privileging of climate, environment, ecology and biosphere as continuations of self-sustaining life was already prefigured when Foucault spoke about the possible erasure of man. Here, one would not assume that the future would only need to be altered in degree in order for life to continue: one would ask whether the future would be one of life. That is, would all those disciplinary norms, including a distinction among hard sciences of data, human sciences of self-management, and the humanities as self-interpretive, not be fragmented following their dissolution and failure in the face of impending catastrophe? If we did *not* assume that life (as it is) were self-evidently worth sustaining, if life were not viable, could not be adapted, then we would no longer be reading and managing the human, via the humanities, but would be asking how we might think in the absence of sustained human life. This would lead, in turn, to thinking climate intensively—and this, in turn, would require not only adjusting concepts but creating new concepts, or even thinking beyond concepts. At its simplest, climate change 'policy' would have to shift from being *political—*the coming together of bodies in common via a common language of sustaining and adapting—to become *impolitic.*  What ways of speaking would fragment, disturb and destroy the logics of self-maintenance that have always sustained humanity as an animal that cannot question its existence? (Humanity has, of course, always questioned the *essence* of its existence—who is man?—but it has rarely questioned the actuality of its existence: that it may *not be.*) To consider the future *intensively* we would at least begin with the possibility that an event might occur to 'us' that would create a mutation of such a force that 'we' would no longer exist. What we have known as human life, supposedly marked by instrumental reason, self-maintenance, risk-assessment, management of resources and exchange with a view to relatively short-term futures, would give way to a being *that does not have a future.*

As long as we calculate the future as one of sustaining, maintaining, adapting and rendering ourselves viable, the future will differ only in degree; this would mean of course that there would be no future for us other than an eventual, barely lived petering out. If, however, we entertained the erasure of the human (especially as defined through the discipline of the humanities, whereby humanity is that fragment of a selfmaintaining nature that can sustain itself through reading itself) then there might be a future. This would not be a future of the *climate*, of a terrain or habitation, and certainly not of an environment—as that which environs or encloses. For if the experience of climate change were to be experienced it would disclose that there is no climate, biosphere or environment. There is not 'a' world, existing in the manner of an organism, that maintains and sustains itself.

*Chapter 3*

# **A Globe of One's Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth**

Questions, today, of climate and climate ethics—and even concerns regarding the sustainability and viability of this life of ours on earth appear to present a new imaginary for political questions. One might say that it was only in the late twentieth century, with events such as the picturing of the earth from space, the possibility of nuclear annihilation of earthly life or the increasing speeds of new media allowing for the possibility of global audiences (such as the entire world viewing 9/11), that something like the problem of a global ethos would emerge. If there had always been a silent presupposed 'we'1 in any ethical theory, then this virtual universalism would always struggle alongside moral valorizations of specified communities.2 How do we, from the particular world we inhabit, begin to think of life as such? It is the present sense of the planet as a whole, as a fragile bounded globe that might present us, finally, with the opportunity and imperative to think a genuine ethos. Now that we have a notion of *climate* that seems to break with the etymology of this specific inclination or latitude *of the earth* , and does so by gesturing to something like a sense of the earth as *a* region or inclination in itself, this might open a new imaginary of the globe. We might think of ethos as no longer bound to a territory within the planet; instead there might be the ethos of this globe of our own, that has no other region against which we might define ourselves or towards which we might direct our fantasies of another future. If there is something like climate change, perhaps it takes this form: not only a mutation of this climate (warming, depleting, becoming more volatile) but an alteration of what we take climate to be. One might want to suggest that as long as we think of climate in its traditional sense—as our specific milieu—we will perhaps lose sight of climate change, or the degree to which human life is now implicated in timelines and rhythms beyond that of its own borders.