I prefer to throw my hat in the ring with the cool kids. You can’t really bomb thinking back to the days before Hume, when, if you were Doctor Johnson, you could kick a stone to refute an argument, as if what those considering how things may not just naïvely exist needed was just a good slap upside the head. The trouble is, turning up the fader on the correlatee—whereas Hegel had turned it all the way down—is ridiculed as essentialism. This might be a way to rationalize a fear that such a move actually wouldn’t be regressive but simply non-Hegelian, returning thinking not to a state before Hume but to just after him, to Kant. Instead of freaking out and papering over the human–world gap, we could go the other way and allow the gap to exist, which in the end means that Kant’s way of containing the explosiveness of his idea must also be let go. In turn, this means that we release the anthropocentric copyright control on the gap and allow everything in the universe to have it, which means dropping the idea that (human) thought is the top access mode and holding that brushing against, licking or irradiating are also access modes as valid (or as invalid) as thinking.
Adorno argues that true progress looks like regression.11 Stepping outside the charmed circle of the decider is seen as absurd or dangerous, as louche essentialism, as a whole style, not just as a set of ideas. The person who would do that isn’t the person you want to be if you’re trained in theory class: some kind of hippie. Of course, in reality race, gender and environmentality are deeply intertwined, as the strong correlationist New Leftist will admit when it becomes tactically necessary to talk about the environment as, for instance, a discursively (in the Foucauldian sense) produced feature of social space. But this sidesteps the elephant in the room—the literal elephant in the room. Social space is always already construed as human—the one constructed thing that one can’t interfere with is the level at which we start to turn up the fader on the correlatee.
Speaking of hippies, destructuring Western philosophy to include nonhumans in a meaningful way starts to look, from within culturalism, like appropriating non-Western cultures, and in particular the cultures of First Peoples, indigenous people. If it’s not possible to cross from one decider’s domain to another, it is because they are totally different realities; the correlatee fader has been turned way down to the point where correlatees are only blank screens, so crossing from one decider’s domain to another’s must violate a basic rule of decorum. Despite the fact that some Western philosophers are allowing non-Western thought to influence them, and despite the fact that this allowance in part disarms the bomb to make the world a safer place, what this looks like to some is doing the unforgivable, gauche, hippie thing of dressing up like a Native American. If I were Oscar Wilde, that deliciously aestheticist and paradoxical socialist, I might archly observe that it looks to the culturalist bad enough to cross over to another’s culture without permission, and even worse to be so unstylishly dressed.
These critiques miss the target because they rely on an idea of the incommensurability of cultures. This idea stems from strong correlationism (Hegel). Strong correlationism is equated with imperialism: cultural difference can be used to justify imposing an alien bureaucratic power layer on top of an existing indigenous culture, for example. The critique of crossing over, or of arguing for commensurability, is a symptom of the very imperialism from which one is trying to rescue thinking by departing from strong correlationist orthodoxy. How ironic is that?
One view to which I adhere is object-oriented ontology, or OOO. I have described already its basic move of releasing the anthropocentric copyright control on who or what gets to be a correlator, rather than regressing to pre-Kantian essentialism. OOO has been subjected precisely to this criticism, that it is appropriating indigenous cultures when it talks about nonhumans as “agents” or “lively.” It is as if white Western thought is required to remain white, Western and patriarchal in order to provide an easy-to-identify target. The net effect is an ironic situation in which nothing can change, because it would be wrong for someone in that lineage not to sound like that. The Hegelianism structuring both imperialist and anti-imperialist thought domains is like a highly sensitive laser motion detector, stepping over which sets off loud alarms that make it impossible to hear oneself think. As you enter the humanities building, you had better burn the hippie gear you were wearing on the avenue outside and put on the black-on-black costume of stagehands who see through the naïvety of the actors, or you will end up pathologized and thus incapable of being seen or heard.
But allowing for others to exist in some strong sense, joining their ways of accessing things or at least appreciating them, just is solidarity. Solidarity requires having something in common. But having something in common is exactly what culturalism sees as essentialism, and thus as reactionary primitivism. How do you get there—solidarity—from here—the strong correlationism that lords over Marxist, anti-imperialist and imperialist thought domains? Perhaps having something in common is a spurious, dangerous concept? Perhaps we could reimagine solidarity without having anything in common? This is the popular approach from within strong correlationism. Or perhaps—and this is Humankind’s approach—we could reimagine what “to have in common” means. I chose the title Humankind as a deliberate provocation to those scholars who think that “having in common” is based on ideas that are less acceptable than farting in church.
THE SEVERING
“Solidarity” is an intriguing word. It describes a state of physical and political organization, and it describes a feeling.12 This itself is significant because “solidarity” cuts against a dominant ontological trend, default since the basic social, psychic and philosophical foreclosure of the human–nonhuman symbiotic real that we call the Neolithic.13 Let’s think up a dramatic Game of Thrones–sounding name for it. Let’s call it “the Severing.” Why such a dramatic name? What the Severing names is a trauma that some humans persist in reenacting on and among ourselves (and obviously on and among other lifeforms). The Severing is a foundational, traumatic fissure between, to put it in stark Lacanian terms, reality (the human-correlated world) and the real (ecological symbiosis of human and nonhuman parts of the biosphere). Since nonhumans compose our very bodies, it’s likely that the Severing has produced physical as well as psychic effects, scars of the rip between reality and the real. One thinks of the Platonic dichotomy of body and soul: the chariot and the charioteer, the chariot whose horses are always trying to pull away in another direction.14 The phenomenology of First Peoples points in this direction, but left thought hasn’t been looking that way, fearful of primitivism, a concept that inhibits thinking outside agrilogistic parameters.15
The starkness of the Lacanian model is itself an artifact of the Severing, derived from Hegel’s defensive reaction against the shockwave sent by Kant’s correlationist ontology. Humankind will cleave closer to Jean-François Lyotard’s way of thinking the difference between the correlatee and the correlator. For Lyotard, the real–reality boundary must be spongy. Stuff leaks through such that the real manifests not just as gaps and inconsistencies in reality. There is a loose, thick, wavy line between things and their phenomena, expressed in the dialectical tension between what Lyotard calls “discourse” and what he calls “figure.” Figure can bleed into discourse, by which