Does this rip in social space mean that lovely, organic, indigenous (and also explosively) holist Edenic prehistory has been torn apart? Far from it. What humans did was to sever their ties to an implosive, ultimately meaningless and contingent symbiotic real. The violence of post-Mesopotamian civilization is precisely not a deracination from Nature. The violence is the establishment of a human “world,” cozy, seemingly self-contained and explosively holist, walled off from the disturbing/wonderful paranoid play of the symbiotic real. A world bounded by wild Nature on its physical outside, and by Eden on its historical outside. Humankind is not a fragmented being trying to stitch itself back together again into Adam Kadmon or Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Severing consists precisely in the stitching-together itself, one of whose logical conclusions is fascism; a schizophrenic defense against the void of the symbiotic real. Religion in this sense is the prototype of anti-Semitism, a conspiracy theory (Fall narratives, for example) that provides a reason for the weird palpations and shifty affiliations, the illusory play and physical intensity of the symbiotic real.
Cutting forward an eyelash-flutter more of geological time, what happened is as follows. Neoliberalism turned social space into a wafer-thin sheet through the gauze of which could be glimpsed the wafer-thin sheet of a planet ravaged by neoliberalism. This double void provoked an intense regressive reaction, akin to the schizophrenic defense, in which non-white, non-male humans are dehumanized and made inhuman, thus opening up an Uncanny Valley across whose foreshortened-to-nothing space anthropocentrism sees the decisively nonhuman Other. (We’ll explore the Uncanny Valley in greater detail later in this book.)
Inside the mandala of social space, Real People (with essentialist capital letters) exist. Solidarity with nonhumans would be equivalent to allowing nonhumans into a club, of inclusion versus exclusion. If there is no “outside” to actually existing ecological space, since the symbiotic real has no certain center or edge (Where do you, where can you draw the line when you think interdependence?), how on earth does this exclusive club function? If your picture of solidarity is explicitly or secretly based on this ontology of social space, it’s not really left-wing, and it’s not really going to work—and it definitely won’t be able to include nonhumans. The inside–outside difference is foundational to metaphysics.30 The falsity of an inside–outside model is becoming more obvious as we enter an age of increasing knowledge concerning the seemingly obvious fact that that we live on a planet. Where on earth is “away” when we have planetary awareness? One’s garbage doesn’t go “away”—it just goes somewhere else; capitalism has tended to create an “away” that is (fortunately) no longer thinkable.31
If there is no inside–outside boundary, social space must already include nonhumans, albeit unconsciously. Thus, its contradictions must be structural: they transcend empirical differences. It’s not the case that there are “real” or “more real” beings toward the center of a mandala of concentric circles. It’s that differences are always arbitrarily produced by acts of violence (social, psychic and philosophical) on beings that cannot in any sense be arbitrarily divided in such ways (hence the violence).
The crack in social space is an artifact of the Severing. Trying to visualize how the world (“reality,” or how we access the real) would look if it wasn’t there is almost taboo. The taboo means that at some point our visualization defaults to the right-wing circle. Visualize just a circle without a crack—again, this is impossible since there is no inside–outside boundary! Solidarity would then begin to mean something like religious communion, the circle of the elect protected from the beings they excluded in some way. We claim that human solidarity couldn’t be like that because we claim that differences are irreducible without violence. But if someone starts considering whether porpoises can be part of revolutionary struggle, some will balk and default to a view that looks like the mandala of concentric circles.
Humankind requires a new theory of violence.
Explosive holism whispers in our ear that religious communion is precisely what solidarity means, because social space is greater than the sum of its parts. And this only works if we cleave in some sense to agricultural religion. And agricultural religion is one of the most basic ways in which agricultural society talks about itself—agricultural society, which is based on the Severing. Our very image of solidarity is predicated on never achieving solidarity with nonhumans!
Solidarity with nonhumans becomes radically impossible: it mustn’t be achieved, otherwise something very basic will fall apart. You can’t get there from here—so “stewardship” and other varieties of command-control (ultimately religion-derived) models of human relationships with nonhumans are also no good for ecological solidarity. Ecological stewardship is ostensibly opposed to anthropocentric tyranny; but both are artifacts of the Severing. Stewardship is the “lite” or less directly coercive (more hegemonic or panoptical) version. One should be the lord over nonhumans, not their tyrant; feudal rather than Assyrian. The capitalist upgrade of this concept is being efficient, minimizing one’s impact on Earth; the language that works just as well in the Exxon boardroom as it works in the ’70s environmentalist language of “Small Is Beautiful.” Small is beautiful because you are part of a transcendental whole—don’t rock the boat and make too big a splash in the world. Such thought, often fueled by systems theory, deviates from the feudal and Mesopotamian modes only by acephalically distributing power throughout social space, a biopolitics whose apogee is the Nazi concentration camp. The panopticon is a mandala with nothing in the center, fully automated governance. A social order based on ecology might be the most coercive and oppressive social space ever. The association with fascism is obvious. Do we just give up? Or is something wrong with our theory of solidarity?
Esoteric mandala theory isn’t based on concentric circles at all. According to the esoteric theory—the theory preserved in the VIP lounges of agricultural-age religions—mandalas lack a center or an edge; the concentric-circles model is a reification. Esoteric theory proclaims that it’s not the essentialism of the right-wing mandala that’s the problem, it’s the metaphysics of presence, which defines essences as explosively holistic. No matter how different and disparate my parts are, as a whole I am Tim all the way through and all the way down. Such a belief is deeply at odds with the symbiotic real.
The struggle for solidarity with nonhumans must therefore include a struggle against the agricultural-age religion that still structures our world, down to the most basic logics of part–whole relations. Western philosophy is a rationalized upgrade of religious discursive space, not unlike how capitalism is an acephalic upgrade of the space of agricultural tyranny. Isn’t this maddening quality the Severing in its most stripped-down, zero-degree mode? Pure exclusion, exclusion for its own sake, without empirical beings to point to that are included and excluded? Including nonhumans in this acephalic space of distributed power would be schizogenic. Exclusion would be everywhere, but would apply to no empirical being in particular. It would be right to run screaming from such a vision of environmentalist utopia.
Fully transcending theism and its various upgrades would be equivalent to achieving ecological awareness in social, psychic and philosophical space. It would be tantamount to allowing at least some of the symbiotic real to bleed through. Marx argues that communism begins in atheism, and undermining the Severing by subverting theistic thought modes and institutions would necessarily include nonhuman beings in the march toward communism.32 Doing so would be tantamount to abolishing at least one gigantic chunk of private property: nonhuman beings as slaves and food for humans. It would be wrong to see this as giving nonhumans rights,