Defiant Earth by Clive Hamilton

Author:Clive Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

It’s not the case that we promoters of the nonhuman are trying to extinguish the human altogether, or burst outside it. We are simply allowing nonhumans to be what they are, namely entangled with us in all kinds of strange ways, neither absolutely reducible to human access nor completely divorced from it. And nonhumans get to access us, and one another.18

Even so, the post-humanist, or new materialist, redistribution of agency both deflates human power and control in the world by embedding us in material networks, and inflates the agency of non-human matter (dead and alive) by attributing to it the ability, through that same embedding, to control humans. The new materialists do this by sleight of hand, by the deployment of metaphors to attribute qualities to material things as if they applied literally. So, in one of the more systematic expositions of the new materialism, Timothy James LeCain writes of the nonhuman material world as “creating,” “constituting,” “shaping,” “making,” “producing,” and “enslaving” humans; in short, “things have power over us” so that we are “in the earth’s hands.” Coal and oil “demand that humans conform to their material needs”; coal “helped create modern democracy” and “some very powerful material things . . . have increasingly come to dictate our collective fate.”19

A material object that produces, demands, enslaves, and dictates is one to which intention is attributed, where in fact it only has influence. The ascription of intention, and therefore choice, to dead objects or non-human animals that lack the capacity, physical and intellectual, to make and execute plans to change humans is in fact a program of anthropomorphism and therefore anthropocentrism by stealth. The post-humanist habit of anthropomorphizing is quite unlike that of Earth System scientists who reach for phrases like “the angry beast” to describe the Earth in the Anthropocene, knowing the reader will understand them as metaphors.

If embedded humans do indeed co-evolve with a material world, each influencing the other, it only means that humans are constrained – and empowered – to exercise their enormous power within material networks, networks that now constellate around the anthropos so that we are justified in naming the new epoch the Anthropocene. Moreover, if humans and the material world co-evolve, the implication that they do so in some kind of harmonious unity has to be challenged. The Anthropocene’s fracture between human and Earth ruptures all harmony.

Buried in the new materialist deflation of human agency lies a quietist political philosophy. If “some very powerful material things . . . have increasingly come to dictate our collective fate” we have no choices and must accept the dictatorship of things. LeCain himself takes Nietzsche’s misanthropic position, suggesting that we may now be discovering that the Earth is “deeply inhospitable to intelligent hominid life.” The only savior might be for us to return to a “far more ancient understanding of the material environment.” Turning back the historical clock could not work in the post-Enlightenment Holocene, let alone the Anthropocene.

The story of humans-as-just-another-species cannot withstand the arrival of the Anthropocene.

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