Here from the blog of David C. McLean.
(Here the current form of the manifesto for goddess says, Emma,
the next Emma book that I am writing. I do think that this is
interesting & important. I include footnotes, endnotes obviously in
the blog form, & hope that this does not make the reader lose her
erection.)
Earlier this year, I wrote a manifesto for too little beast, a
revised & posthuman version of the shorter antinatalist manifesto
for too much human, a chapbook that I had written a few years
previously. Now this present text is an addendum, an extension, &
a clarification of parts of that earlier manifesto. I shall not
supply a list of references, & I do not think that footnotes are
very appropriate in a book of poems; they are fine in novels, not
poems, but I have used them anyway in case the reader wants to find
out more about the subject. Basically, what I add here boils down to
the observation that posthumanism, allied to new materialism, is an
extension of the liberatory effect of feminism that adds the whole
relational context of animal & vegetable being to the agents &
patients to be taken into account in discourse.
By "posthuman", I do not want to lead the reader to
thoughts of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, whatever, which are a
part of transhumanism, since I myself am inclined to interpret
posthumanism as more of a focus on the nonhuman after the end of
humanism, which has very much overstayed its welcome. In Francesca
Ferrando's terminology,
I would probably count as belonging to the post-anthropocentric wing
of the posthuman, which is actually, according to Ferrando, more
radical. As she points out, transhumanism is a sort of
ultra-humanism. Posthumanism, on the other hand, originated in
feminist discourse in the eighties & nineties; it is opposed to
speciesism, it is opposed to exceptionalism, & it is
anti-exclusionary. There is a metahumanism that bases itself on the writings of Deleuze,
& that emphasizes the significations of relational embodiment,
but I shall not discuss this further here
In general posthumanism is a rethinking of what humanity &
humanism's place, if any, should be in the world. Here, as elsewhere,
I always mean "world" as something very much like Welt
in Heidegger, as opposed to Erde, or "earth". The
world is the framework of meaning & definitions by which we who
use language understand things in the world; it is human &
verbal. The earth is being as such, presencing, & it sustains,
shelters, & protects. It cannot be grasped or exhausted by the
world, it is pre-verbal:
The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through
the world. …The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise
the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world
cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and
concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it
there.
(Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art)
The earth in all of my books for Emma, & in this one too, is
something sacred given by goddess, the fire & love at the heart
of being, it is beast who lives there alone, poor in world.
Now Heidegger was an opponent of humanism, as a relic of essentialist
metaphysics, & his work has been seen as eminently suitable to
ground a deep ecological understanding of the predicament we now
face.
Both Arne Naess, who founded deep ecology, & the later Heidegger
argue that ethics, the world around us, & human beings must be
understood in new ways in order to save the environment. The natural
environment should be seen as a value in itself, not just as
framework for resources.
Mankind is not the sovereign, at best a shepherd of being for
Heidegger, a subject who must widen & deepen her narrow isolation
to become the deep self for Naess, & in both cases what is called
for is a radical transmutation. There is a releasement for Heidegger
& Naess, there is a becoming & a conversion for me.
In all cases a surrender to the self-giving of poiesis,
both as phusis &
through our techne,
which waits respectfully for
what is given us, takes place. Cost benefit analysis will
never get us there. Part of respecting deep ecology or earth,
however, is a posthuman perspective. So I see the Heidegger/Naess
deep ecological perspective as a natural way of applying this
posthumanist perspective, an allied philosophy that calls for a
transformation & a questioning of how subjectivity is understood.
Now, as noted, many people understand posthumanism as something to do
with AI or robotics, whatever, some form of transhumanism, an
extension of the human. I am not espousing this. Far from it, I
instead would refer the reader to Lyotard, & the case of his
postmodernism, understood as a detachment from the grand narratives
of modernism. Postmodernism is also something that precedes
modernism, it's a crisis state of modernism itself, & the "post"
should not be taken as implying a strict & sequential evolution
from modernism to postmodernism, the latter understood as a successor
state to the less developed former state.
For me, posthumanism also implies a de-evolution, a reevaluation of
evolutionary "priorities", & a variegated
becoming-beast. As in Deleuze & Guattari & becoming-animal,
it is a real becoming that does not necessarily involve an actual end
state with some physical animal body. Now it just so happens that I am a
shapeshifter, Emma made this start, it is she who first made this
change happen in me, & I might have inadvertently scared other
people on occasion by changing at heightened or excited moments. It
is not, however, the case that becoming beast necessarily involves
this actual change. I would, however, advocate it; we are not all
permitted to evolve, but it is possible to switch allegiance, to
identify as something better, to not let whatever it is that screams
our passion & desire be stifled & restricted any more by our
genetic identity than it should be by an outdated set of gender
roles.
Now valuing the beast is not to be misunderstood as idealizing the
cute animal, or ignoring the savagery & violence of nature. I do
not have issues with pain, violence, predators predating. I myself
am a vegan for moral & ecological reasons, but that is another
issue, I'm just not biologically a carnivore. Wolves or cats
predating is not a moral issue, they are moral patients, not moral
agents. Me eating meat would be a moral issue, & for a great
number of reasons. The complaint of the carnist is a disgusting echo
of the past: "Don't worry about slaves." "Don't
worry about women." "Don't worry about animals."
As i said in the earlier manifesto, humanism used to have a point. It
was a grand narrative or meta-narrative that established science &
empiricism, broke away from the religious control of everything. This
was because theology was the principal enemy then, & the proper
study of mankind, according to humanism, was "man".
As I wrote in the first manifesto: "Posthumanism does not only
or necessarily involve hybrids & AI. It can be a return to a
prehuman animal identity, as the postmodern precedes the modern. The
beast precedes the human both in the order of chronology &, now,
let's be realistic, in the order of priority. I am animal: not
subhuman or superhuman, just different." We need to shake off
the old identifications, as well as the belief that the earth that
shelters & protects us is of any less value than the cultural
worlds that goddam humans inflict upon that earth.
Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the
semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems
that at every turn lately, every "thing " - even
materiality - is turned into a matter of language or some other form
of cultural representation.
Barad is a new materialist. For new
materialism, there is no clear line between matter & culture. As
biology is mediated by culture, so is culture a product of biological
organisms. The problem with radical constructivism is that, as Barad
points out, one pays attention to everything but nature & matter.
"the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is
matter."
To posthumanism & new materialism, it all matters. Ferrando
describes the work of Butler as creating a lack of balance, where
only language & culture was recognized. Butler's Bodies
that Matter does not recognize
the influence of the actual matter in the body, & how socially
constructed biology is reciprocally constructed by the matter that
Butler sometimes seems to think does not matter.
I shall here quote the end of the last manifesto:
The Anthropocene is leaving terrible scars on this planet, on this
Earth that shelters & protects. It is a relic of an obsolete
humanism to pretend that the human race deserves any special
consideration compared to other sentient beings, & even worse to
believe with the religions of the disgusting book that any god has
given humanity the right or duty to consume the flesh of animals &
possess them as chattels. The only beast, mankind, with a whole
history of being scumbags, polluting everything else with their
dreadful excess.
There is too little beast. There is too much human.
We have to see that all sentient
life is of value. Compassion for all sentient beings, & respect
for the ecosystems of the earth that they need to flourish, shows us
that deep ecology, based on evaluating all aspects of animal &
plant life positively since it all fits together & nature
functions as a whole, should lead to a reduction, at the very least,
of the drastic human overpopulation. The reduction should be probably
be very large. Not only sentient life, but all life, is morally
significant, at least in part because all sentient life is part of
the whole earth & relies on non-sentient life to sustain it.
There is certainly something that
Ferrando would describe as an antihumanist tendency that is
discernible in my work, but this is, as she points out, not really
part of posthumanism, which is about the deconstruction of the
humanist ideal rather than a destructive declaration of the "death
of man" in any Foucauldian
or Nietzschean sense. In the
same way, my antinatalism does not extend to total pessimism & a
desire for the total extinction of humanity, just much more restraint
in reproduction.
More nature, more animals, more
beast; less human, fewer humans. As Ferrando says close to the end of
her piece:
As the anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human
activities on a planetary level, the posthuman focuses on
de-centering the human from the primary focus of the discourse. In
tune with antihumanism, posthumanism stresses the urgency for humans
to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged,
negatively affects the human condition as well. In such a framework,
the human is not approached as an autonomous agent, but is located
within an extensive system of relations.
Goddess gave us earth. Stop fucking
it up. She put other creatures there to share it with "us".
Stop driving them to extinction. No species is more important than
any other. Even bugs that might gross me out have a goddess-given
right to live. Posthumanism is not denying anything;
we're just pointing out that a lot of other things are equally
important. You can have ten million people in Sweden but you can't
have twenty thousand wolves like Spain does? Get over yourselves,
humans.
