Ecology against Mother Nature:
Slavoj Žižek on Molecular Red
By Slavoj Žižek / 26
May 2015
How are we to think the
anthropocene? Slavoj
Žižek, in his review of McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red below,
offers a comment on one of the most pressing questions of our time. For Žižek, Molecular
Red provides some answers to the major fallacies of ecological discourse:
"If there is one good thing about capitalism it is that under it, Mother
Earth no longer exists."
On November 28, 2008, Evo
Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter titled “Climate
Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism”. Here are its opening statements:
Sisters and brothers: Today,
our Mother Earth is ill. … Everything began with the industrial revolution in
1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system. In two and a half centuries,
the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil
fuels created over five million centuries. … Under Capitalism Mother Earth does
not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the
asymmetries and imbalances in the world.[1]
The politics pursued by the
Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of today’s
progressive struggle—but, nonetheless, the quoted lines render with painful
clarity its ideological limitation (for which one always pays a practical
price). Morales relies on the narrative on the Fall which took place at a
precise historical moment (“Everything began with the industrial revolution in
1750…”) and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in Mother
Earth (“Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist”). To this, one is tempted
to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism it is that under it,
Mother Earth no longer exists. “Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and
imbalances in the world”—this means that our goal should be to restore
“natural” balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the
very rise of modern subjectivity, which obliterates the traditional sexualized
cosmology of Mother Earth (and Father Heaven), of our roots in the substantial
“maternal” order of nature.
Ecology is one of today’s
major ideological battlefields, with a whole series of strategies to obfuscate
the true dimensions of the ecological threat: (1) simple ignorance—it’s a
marginal phenomenon, not worthy of preoccupation, life (of capital) goes on,
nature will take care of itself; (2) science and technology can save us; (3)
leave the solution to the market (higher taxation of the polluters, etc.); (4)
superego pressure, emphasising personal responsibility instead of large
systemic measures—each of us should do what he/she can (recycle, consume less,
etc.); (5) maybe the worst of them all is the advocating of a return to natural
balance, to a more modest traditional life by means of which we renounce human
hubris and become respectful children of our Mother Nature again. But this
whole paradigm of Mother Nature derailed by our hubris is wrong. Why? McKenzie
Wark’s Molecular Red provides an answer.[2]
The core of ecological crisis
is a phenomenon noted already by Marx, the so-called “metabolic rift” caused by
expanding capitalist productivity. In Wark’s words: “Labor pounds and wheedles
rocks and soil, plants and animals, extracting the molecular flows out of which
our shared life is made and remade. But those molecular flows do not return
from whence they came” (xiii). When such a rift caused by human industry begins
to pose a threat to the very reproduction of life on earth, so that humanity
literally becomes a geological factor, we enter a new era of the Anthropocene:
The Anthropocene is a series
of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and
technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so
that the cycle can renew itself. (xiv)
Wark designates the agency of
this growing rift with the ironic term, the “Carbon Liberation Front”: “The
Carbon Liberation Front seeks out all of past life that took the form of
fossilized carbon, unearths it and burns it to release its energy. The
Anthropocene runs on carbon” (xv). There is a paradox in the very heart of this
notion of the Anthropocene: humanity became aware of its self-limitation as a species
precisely when it became so strong that it influenced the balance of all life
on earth. It was able to dream of being a Subject only until its influence on
nature (earth) was no longer marginal, i.e., only against the background of a
stable nature.
Notions like “rift” and
perturbed “cycle” seem to rely on their opposite: on a vision of a “normal”
state of things where the cycle is closed and the balance reestablished, as if
the Anthropocene should be overcome by simply re-installing the human species
into this balance. Wark’s key achievement is to reject this path: there never
was such a balance, nature in itself is already unbalanced, the idea of Nature
as a big Mother is just another image of the divine big Other. For Wark, I am
one of the big bad guys since I embody “all the old vices” (17) of
contemplative materialism detached from praxis—yet I agree with his basic
approach of dismissing Nature as the last figure of the big Other:
the God who still hid in the
worldview of an ecology that was self-correcting, self-balancing and
self-healing—is dead … The human is no longer that figure in the foreground
which pursues its self-interest against the background of a wholistic,
organicist cycle that the human might perturb but with which it can remain in balance
and harmony, in the end, by simply withdrawing from certain excesses. (xii)
Consequently, after the death
of the God-Father, the masculine Reason, we should also endorse the death of
the Goddess-Nature: “To dispense with the invisible hand, and with homeostatic
ecology as a basic metaphor, is to live once again after God is dead” (209).
Firstly, we never encounter nature-in-itself: the nature we encounter is
always-already caught in antagonistic interaction with collective human labour.
But secondly, the gap separating human labour from intractable nature (all that
resists our grasp) is irreducible. Nature is not an abstract “in-itself” but
primarily the resisting counterforce that we encounter in our labour. However,
we have to make one further step here. The fiction of a stable nature disturbed
by human intervention is wrong even as an inaccessible ideal that we may
approach if we withdraw as much as possible from our activity. Nature is
already in itself disturbed, out of joint:
We still tend to think that if
we stop certain actions, an ecology will right itself and return to
homeostasis. But perhaps that is not the case. … What if there is only an
unstable nature… (200)
The rift between labour and
intractable nature should be supplemented not only by a rift within nature
itself, which makes it forever unstable, but also by a rift emerging from
within humanity itself. This rift, which explodes in modernity, is the “divorce
between the sensation of the world and the idea of it” (105). We should not read
this rift in the traditional humanist-Marxist sense, as the “alienation” of
“higher” theoretical activity from living collective practice. Rather, we
should read it as the fact that the living, practical experience of reality
cannot be elevated into the ultimate resort—and therein resides the lesson of
modern science and technology. The “inhuman” realm (the field of quantum
oscillations is exemplary) is beneath our direct experience, accessible only
through scientific theories: this queer world of particle physics “is so far
below the threshold of human perception that we struggle for language to
describe it” (165). Yet what we lack is not so much an appropriate language (we
can construct that easily enough) but, much more, an appropriate
sensation-experience of this queer world as a part of our reality. The same
holds for the “Carbon Liberation Front”, our knowledge of which “is a knowledge
that can only be created via a techno-scientific apparatus so extensive that it
is now an entire planetary infrastructure” (180). Here also, as Wagner would
have put it, die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der sie schlug [the wound can be
healed only by the spear which smote it].
My only critical point is that
Wark’s unsurpassable horizon remains what he calls “shared life,” and every
autonomization of any of its moments amounts to a fetishizing alienation: “Our
species-being is lost from shared life when we make a fetish of a particular
idea, a particular love, or a particular labor” (107). Here, however, we should
raise a double question. Firstly, is such an interruption of the flow of shared
life, such a focus on an idea, a beloved, or a task, not precisely what Badiou
calls the Event? So, far from dismissing such cuts as cases of alienation,
should we not celebrate them as the highest expression of the power of
negativity? Furthermore, does our access to the nonhuman molecular level of,
say, the quantum universe, not presuppose precisely such a cut from our shared
daily life? We are dealing here with a properly Hegelian paradox. Hegel praises
the “molar” act of abstraction—the reduction of the complexity of a situation
to the “essential”, to its key feature—as the infinite power of Understanding.
The truly hard thing is not to bear in mind the complexity of a situation, but
to brutally simplify it so that we see its essential form, not its details. The
difficult thing is to see classes, not micro-groups fighting each other; to see
the subject, not the Humean flow of mental states. We are not talking here just
of ideal forms or patterns, but of the Real. The void of subjectivity is the
Real which is obfuscated by the wealth of “inner life”; class antagonism is the
Real which is obfuscated by the multiplicity of social conflicts.
In spite of these critical
notes, one cannot but admire analyses of the thick network of invisible lateral
links which sustain our reality—recall Jane Bennett’s description of how
actants interact at a polluted trash site: not only humans, but also the
rotting trash, worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons, etc., all
play their (never purely passive) role.[3] This is not just the old reductionist idea that one can
translate higher mental or life processes into lower-level processes. The point
is that things happens at a higher level which cannot be explained on this
level’s own terms. (Say, there is a theory that Ancient Rome’s decline was due
to the poisonous effect of the lead particles in their metal pots and bowls.)
Our fight against racism should also be “molecular”: instead of just focusing
on big “molar” explanations of how racism is a displaced class-struggle, etc.,
one should analyse the micro-practices (the thick texture of gestures and
expressions) which display envy, humiliation, etc., of the racial Other. Today
when we are (almost) all open-minded tolerant liberals, racism reproduces
itself precisely at this molecular level: I respect Arabs, Jews, Blacks, etc.,
it’s just that I cannot stand the smell of their food, their loud music, the
vulgar sound of their laughter…
We should thus move beyond the
Deleuzian opposition between molecular and molar, which ultimately reduces the
molar level to a shadowy theatre of representations, in relation to a molecular
level of actual productivity and life-experience. True, the metabolic rift is
operative and can only be established at a “lower” molecular level, but this
molecular level is so low that it is imperceptible not only to “molar” big
politics or social struggles but also to the most elementary forms of
experience. It can only be accessed through “high” theory—in a kind of
self-inverted twist, it is only through the highest that we get to the lowest.
Science, of course, has its own “molecular” material base: its scientific
measuring apparatuses. Although these apparatuses are made by humans and form
part of our ordinary reality, they enable us gain access to weird domains which
are NOT part of our experiential human reality, from quantum oscillations to
genomes:
There is something inhuman
about science. Its modes of perception, modeling and verifying are outside the
parameters of the human sensorium, even though they are dependent on an
apparatus that is itself the product of human labor. The objects of science are
not dependent on human consciousness. And yet science happens in history,
constrained by forms of social organization of a given type and of a given
time. As such, existing social relations are a fetter upon science in its
pursuit of the inhuman sensations of the nonhuman real. (208)
Along these lines, Karan Barad
is right to point out the narrowness of Bohr’s notion of the apparatus: the
apparatus has its own history, it is the product of social practices and as
such it refracts the larger world of forces and relations of production.
Crucial here is the distinction between nonhuman and inhuman: nonhuman resides
at the same level as human; it is part of the ordinary world in which humans
confront nonhuman things and processes. The apparatus is something different,
neither human nor nonhuman but inhuman:
The inhuman mediates the
nonhuman to the human. This preserves the queer, alien quality of what can be
produced by an apparatus—particle physics for example—without saying too much
about the nonhuman in
advance. (164)
In short, while apparatuses
are immanent to the human, products of human productive and scientific
engagement with reality, they are simultaneously inhuman in the sense that they
enable us to discern the contours of a real that is not part of our reality.
The truly weird element in the triad of humans, the reality they confront, and
the apparatuses they use to penetrate reality is thus not an intractable
external reality, but the apparatuses which mediate between the two extremes
(humans and nonhuman reality). Apparatuses enable humans not only to get to
know the real which is outside the scope of their experiential reality (like
quantum waves); they also enable them to construct new “unnatural” (inhuman)
objects which cannot but appear to our experience as freaks of nature (gadgets,
genetically modified organisms, cyborgs, etc.). The power of human culture is
not only to build an autonomous symbolic universe beyond what we experience as
nature, but to produce new “unnatural” natural objects which materialize human
knowledge. We do not only “symbolize nature”, we—as it were—denaturalize it
from within.
[1] Available online at http://links.org.au/node/769
[2] McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene,
London: Verso Books 2015. Numbers in brackets refer to the pages of this book.
[3] See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, Durham: Duke UP 2010.
