labors with great pain, while the preagricultural Eden with its rich affordances is forever sealed off. The inevitability of the sealing-off is itself a symptom of the death-driven agricultural program, ensuring, like selective amnesia, that the traumatic Severing cannot be directly experienced, and so not traversed and resolved. It explains why attempts to do so are seen as childish, regressive, or ridiculous—precisely because they are appropriate.
A LEFT HOLISM
Solidarity must mean human psychic, social and philosophical being resisting the Severing. This is not as hard as it seems because the basic symbiotic real requires no maintaining by human thought or psychic activity. Western philosophy has been telling itself that humans, in particular human thought, makes things real for so long that an ethics or politics based simply on allowing something real to impinge on us sounds absurd or impossible. Solidarity, a thought and a feeling and a physical and political state, seems in its pleasant confusion of feeling-with and being-with, appearing and being, phenomena and thing, active and passive, not simply to gesture to this non-severed real, but indeed to emerge from it. Solidarity is a deeply pleasant, stirring feeling and political state, and it is the cheapest and most readily available because it relies on the basic, default symbiotic real. Since solidarity is so cheap and default, it extends to nonhumans automatically.
Solidarity also restarts temporality. Solidarity means being freed from one’s being caught in the past and to have entered a vibrant nowness in which the future opens. I will explore this later.
“Solidarity” is a word used for the “fact” (as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it) of “being perfectly united or at one.” And solidarity is also used for the constitution of a group as such, the example given being the notorious notion of “the human race,” aka species, what is now called the “Anthropos” of the dreaded Anthropocene, a new geological era (officially dated to 1945) marked by human-made materials such as plastics, nucleotides and concretes in the upper layers of Earth’s crust.24 Existing thought protocols in the humanities make this geological era look like an embarrassing generalization, an Enlightenment horror that strips historical specificity, race, class and gender from the human. The concept of species as such, lurking behind the notion of the Anthropocene, seems violently antique, like a rusty portcullis.
To add insult to injury, solidarity can mean “community,” and this term is also compromised by notions of full presence and volkisch sentiments. Solidarity presses all the wrong buttons for us educated people. No wonder Hardt and Negri spend so much time finessing it into a diffuse deterritorial feeling at the end of their magnum opus, Empire.25 Contemporary solidarity theories want it to be as un-solid and as un-together as possible. They want the community of those who have nothing in common, or a community of unworking or inoperation.26 Heaven forbid that we feel something in common. On the other hand, scholars have become fascinated with the effortless emergence of commonality, as long as it is not too personal; systems, and how they emerge magically from simple differences that, in the Batesonian lingo, make a difference. How the hermeneutical frame of “making a difference” is established in advance (as it must, in order for the differentiating mark to start to work its magic) always eludes systems theories.
We are either resisting an agricultural-age religion by waging war against what we consider to be essentialism; or we are promoting agricultural-age religion by other means, by marveling at the miracle of self-creating entities that emerge from a primordial non-marked chaos. In either case, we are operating with reference to agricultural religion, which is the initial experiential, social and thought mode of the Severing, a massive privatization of access to the real. Only the monarch, a divinely appointed displacement of human powers, has the hotline to a virtual version of him or herself, a further displacement of those powers. Houston, we have a problem.
Why the allergy to positive, juicy, robust-seeming solidarity? Is the allergy itself a symptom of the Severing? Claude Lévi-Strauss describes an experiment in which the upper and lower class of an indigenous society were asked to draw a simple picture of social space. The ruling-class people drew a simple mandala-like form consisting of concentric circles: the inside is differentiated sharply from the outside, and this difference is repeated inside social space. By contrast, the lower-class people drew a circle with a line running down the middle: an internal fissure (black and white, upper- and lower-class, rich and poor …).27
Figure 1. Contradicting Views of Social Space Keyed to Class
The ruling- and lower-class views are radically asymmetrical. Upper- and lower-class people live in totally different kinds of social space: their ontological structure is profoundly different. In the upper-class case, intact, essentialist beings (the “Real People”) are surrounded and threatened by forces from the outside that are less human, inhuman, or nonhuman. My use of the term “inhuman” refers to extensionally intimate or proximate parts of what discourse or language or power-knowledge (or Dasein, or Spirit, and so on) classifies as “human” that do not fall easily or even at all under that category. Extensionally spatial proximity is anthropocentrically scaled. Or, what seems proximate to the human morphologically is distinguished finely as inhuman: this is the essence of racism. Via the inhuman a distinction is drawn between the human and the nonhuman that is ontic (you can point to it).28
Now we can begin to glimpse the ecological resonance of the ruling-class model, and its traditional agricultural-city format: a walled city, surrounded by fields, surrounded by “the wild.” If solidarity can include nonhumans, how can we get there from here without recourse to the ruling-class mandala? Wouldn’t solidarity mean being solid, an essentialized ball of elect beings defending against an outside? Where on earth is this outside if social space now includes the nonhuman? Ironically, traditional ecological models rely on the ruling-class mandala structure. These exclude the ecological either by constructing a category of the inhuman, a spectral quality that is neither strictly human nor nonhuman. Nature gets to mean something pristine and pure, an endlessly exploitable resource or majestic backdrop to the doings of the (human) folk.
What is the default characteristic of this thought mode? Let’s call it “explosive holism”: a belief, never formally proven but retweeted all the time, that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. The alternatives are limited. You are a traditional theist or into cybernetics (or any other deployments of this concept); or you are the kind who shows their behind to the political father, as Roland Barthes put it.29 You are either in church or you are thumbing your nose at church. In either case, there is a church. It’s one big reason why talk about populations, which is ecological talk, is considered highly suspicious on the academic left. The population concept definitely has no time for its parts, otherwise known as people such as you and me. This is the utilitarian version of explosive holism, and its near monopoly on talk of species is rightly concerning. But if we can’t talk about something like it at all, for fear of sounding like eugenicists or social Darwinists, a left ecology is a fruitless dream. How to proceed?
One very obvious instance of explosive holism is the concept of the invisible hand, developed in Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism and first promulgated by Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees, the subtitle of which is Private Vices, Public Benefits. That difference between private and public is a metaphysical difference between parts and wholes that is also a difference between lesser and greater. The invisible hand has evident theistic overtones, conjuring up images of divine providence. Capitalist ideology has relied strongly on explosive holism. The invisible hand concept is emergent and teleological. A benevolent group telos is said to emerge from the selfish actions of individuals. From this teleology springs social Darwinism, which differs from actual Darwinism on this key point, the strong sense of “survival of the fittest,” a phrase of Herbert Spencer’s inserted into The Origin of Species out of fear for the implications otherwise. Selfish, greedy aggression is good in the long run.
The second obvious contemporary instance of explosive holism is fascism. The Latin term fascis means a bundle of sticks, expressing the bundling of the folk in a whole that transcends its parts and gives it a firm, constantly present depth. Notice the agricultural