that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me? Who is the host and who is the parasite? The term “host” stems from the Latin hostis, a word that can mean both “friend” and “enemy.”1
Fully one-third of human milk, for instance, is not digestible by the baby; instead it feeds bacteria that coat the intestines with immunity-bestowing film.2 When a child is born vaginally, it gains all kinds of immunities from bacteria in the mother’s microbiome. In the human genome there is a symbiont retrovirus called ERV-3 that codes for immunosuppressive properties of the placental barrier. You are reading this because a virus in your mother’s DNA prevented her body from spontaneously aborting you.3 The loose connectivity of the symbiotic real affects other orders of being, such as language. The opening and closing of suckling mammalian lips around the nipple makes an /m/ sound that is surely the basis of words such as “mamma.” Such words are roughly shared by nonhuman mammals, such as cats, whose meows also evoke this action, a sign they learn to use more frequently as adults when they live with humans.
Relying-on is the uneasy fuel of the symbiotic real; this relying-on always has its haunted aspect, so that a symbiont can become toxic or strange-seeming relationships can form, which is how evolution works. The right word to describe this reliance between discrete yet deeply interrelated beings is “solidarity.” Without the tattered incompletion of the symbiotic real at every scale, solidarity would have no meaning. Solidarity is possible and widely available because it is the phenomenology of the symbiotic real as such. Solidarity is how the symbiotic real manifests, the noise it makes. Solidarity also only works when it is thought at this scale.
In so doing, Humankind pushes against the tendency to exclude nonhumans (that is, “the environment” or “ecological issues”) from the thought domains mapped out by the academic New Left since the mid 1960s. The reasons for this exclusion have to do with a dominant Hegelian strand within these thought domains, a “strong correlationism” that has now persisted past the moment at which it was tactically useful. The usefulness consisted in how strong correlationism provided ways to draw necessary circles around white Western cultures, clipping the wings of their ideological sense of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. The argument Humankind makes has until very recently been left in the hands of conservative forces opposed to “cultural relativism” and “theory.” Conceding an entire region—a very large-scale one at that—to the forces of reaction isn’t tactically viable.
Humankind’s thinking outside the Hegelian culturalist box requires a number of curious, counterintuitive steps that will deter some readers. This book is very possibly going to freak you out. The byline could be, “Yes, it’s possible to include nonhuman beings in Marxist theory—but you’re not going to like it!”
WHERE IS THE ECOLOGICAL PRONOUN?
It should be obvious even this early on that one of the principal enemies of what I here call humankind is humanity itself. Post-Enlightenment thought is correct to wage war against this counterpart of so-called Nature, a vanilla essence consisting of white maleness. (I capitalize Nature to de-nature it, like frying an egg, revealing its artificial constructedness and explosive wholeness.) Humankind is violently opposed both to Humanity and to Nature, which has always been a reified distortion of the symbiotic real. (I will now begin to capitalize Humanity for the same reasons as I capitalize Nature.) As planetary awareness continues at breakneck speed to interrupt the propagation of the Humanity–Nature dyad, it is tempting to write big-picture books that deceptively address all humans at all times, while predictably arguing for a teleological account of accelerating success and progress toward a transhuman singularity of electronic enhancements to the Humanity substance.4 Such books are popular worldwide because they inhibit the true ecological awareness.
Humankind is an ecological being that can be found in the symbiotic real. Can I give voice to it in this book?
There is no pronoun entirely suitable to describe ecological beings. If I call them “I,” then I’m appropriating them to myself or to some pantheistic or Gaia concept that swallows them all without regard to their specificity. If I call them “you,” I differentiate them from the kind of being that I am. If I call them “he” or “she,” then I’m gendering them according to heteronormative concepts that are untenable on evolutionary terms. If I call them “it,” I don’t think they are people like me and I’m being blatantly anthropocentric. Ironically, conventional ecological speech talks in terms of “it” and “they,” abstract populations stripped of appearances. Ethical and political speech either becomes impossible or begins to sound like deeply fascist biopolitics. Humans even talk about humans that way: “the human race” is an undifferentiated “it.” Relying on biology alone would mean defining humans as the best among mammals at throwing and sweating.5
And heaven forbid I call them “we,” because of the state of polite scholarship. What am I doing speaking as if we all belong together without regard to cultural difference? What am I doing extending this belonging to nonhumans, like a hippie who never heard that doing so is appropriating the Other? As one respondent enjoyed sneering a few years ago, “Who is the ‘we’ in Morton’s prose?”
If grammar lines up against speaking ecological beings at such a basic level, what hope is there?
I cannot speak the ecological subject, but this is exactly what I’m required to do. I can’t speak it because language, and in particular grammar, is fossilized human thoughts: thoughts, for example, about humans and nonhumans. I can’t say “it” as opposed to “he” or “she,” as I’ve just argued. I can’t say we. I can’t say they.
Sure, I can in some sense speak about lifeforms if I ignore the most interesting question, which is, How do I get to coexist with them? To what extent? In what mode or modes? I can practice biology, for example. But if I’m a biologist I base my research on existing assumptions concerning what counts as alive. And implicitly, as a possibility condition for science as such, I’m talking in the key of “it” and “them” rather than the key of “we.” So, I haven’t made the problem go away.
Right now, in my part of the academy, I’m not allowed to like “We Are All Earthlings,” that song by the Muppets, let alone sing it as if it were some kind of biospheric anthem. I’m supposed to condemn it as deeply white and Western, and so appropriative of indigenous cultures and blithely ignorant of racial and gender difference. I’m trying to make the academy a safe space in which to like “We Are All Earthlings.” This boils down to thinking hard about the “we.”
Ironically, the first scholars in humanist and social science domains to talk about ecology were hostile to theory. They latched on to ecological themes so as to leapfrog over what they didn’t like about the contemporary academy, which have always been the things I like and like to teach: exploring how texts and other cultural objects are constructed, how race, gender and class deeply affect their construction, and so forth. They wrote as if talking about frogs was a way to avoid talking about gender. But frogs also have gender and sexuality. Frogs also have constructs—they access the world in certain ways, their genome expresses (whether “intentionally” or “with imagination” or not) beyond the boundaries of their bodies. In a strange way, then, the early ecocritics were themselves talking about nonhumans in the key of “it”! In drawing a sharp distinction between the artificial and the natural, they remained well within anthropocentric thought space. Humans are artificers; nonhumans are spontaneous. Humans are people; nonhumans are, for all intents and purposes, machines. The ecocritics have hated me for saying it.
I’m not playing ball with either of these sections of the record store of popular intellectual opinion. I’m not going to leapfrog over theory. I’m not going to keep my trap shut about coral. I’m going to be the devil again, and insist that Marxism can include nonhumans—must include nonhumans.
WHAT’S BUGGING MARX?
Economics is how lifeforms organize their enjoyment. That’s why ecology used to be called the economy of nature.6 When you think of it like that, what the discipline of economics excludes is nonhuman beings—the ways we and they organize enjoyment with