immanence

McKenzie Wark gets at some very important issues in what we might call “the ontology of the Anthropocene” in this review of Jason Moore’s book Capitalism in the Web of Life.

Moore’s work, as he acknowledges (and as I have argued here before), provides an important contribution to rethinking the relations between humanity, the nonhuman world, and the techno-economic formations (such as capitalism) that have mediated those relations. But for Wark, Moore’s dialectical approach goes too far in the direction of social construction, whilst retaining the basic binary of nature and society that Moore critiques as “Cartesian.”

Summarizing his critique, Wark writes:

“The achievement of Moore’s book is to move past a metaphysical concept of nature towards an historical one. But in the process the various scientific ways of knowing nature are not recognized as valid and at least partially autonomous. These are assumed to be merely internal to capital – while historical knowledge gets some mysterious, partial exemption from that constraint.”

He agrees with Moore that we cannot adequately understand the human-nature relation without understanding the social and historical dynamics of capitalism, but he argues that

“the reverse is true also, but where the other side of the chiasmus is not nature-in-general as a metaphysical concept, but an ensemble of sciences that know nature as something nonhuman, mediated through an inhuman apparatus of techniques, and only partially contaminated in its aims and metaphors by historically determinate social relations.”

The point here is that the natural sciences need to be given their due — not as unproblematic “discoverers” of reality, but as activities that despite their “contamination” by social relations nevertheless retain something from their contact with the nonhuman, material worlds they study.

Wark makes this argument through reference to two axes that, he notes, tend to get confused: the “substance/relations axis” and the “metaphoric/metonymic axis.” Like the process-relational philosophy I have championed here, Moore’s approach (and Wark’s) is relational rather than substantivist. But, according to Wark, Moore’s is also metaphorical in its substitution of a master metaphor — dialectical interaction — for Descartes’ binary estrangement (of mind and matter, nature and culture, etc.). In the process, the underlying binary duality remains intact.

Wark’s alternative is a metonymic one, which is not about substitution but about displacement. While the difference between metaphor and metonymy harbors Freudian connotations for some literary theorists (thanks to Lacan) — metaphor suppresses, while metonymy combines — and is therefore relevant to the debate between Lacanian philosophies of “lack” and Deleuzian philosophies of “abundance” — I prefer to refer them to a Peircian, triadic understanding of meaning-making. Metaphor here, very loosely speaking, is related to the icon, which represents an object through similarity or resemblance; metonymy to the index, which represents through contiguity or causal relationship. (These aren’t exactly Peirce’s mappings of terms; I’m relying here in part on Roman Jakobson’s work on Peirce.)

Missing so far in this discussion is the third element, Peirce’s symbol, which represents not by resemblance nor by contiguity, but by habit or regularity. A symbol is less a thing than a kind of thing — it is, in fact, a kind. It, like the others, is also an active process — meaning always in the making, rather than meaning made. In this sense, Peircian semiotics is metonymic through and through, in that meaning or reference is always being transferred, always on the move from a here to a there. The difference is that the transferral can be a substitution (icon/metaphor), a causal interaction (index/metonymy), or the development of a new habit and regularity (symbol/sociality).

I add “sociality” there to make the point that the social is, by definition, not one side of a binary opposed to the natural. The entire process is social, or becomes social in the establishment of regularities between entities (or signs, since for Peirce, all humans and other entitites are signs — at once virtual, actual, and symbolic-logical).

If Moore is substituting one metaphor for another in overcoming Cartesianism, and Wark is arguing for ways to think the human-nature relation as metonymic networks, translations and transferences (akin to Haraway’s cyborgs and Actor Network Theory’s hybrids) of something that is both more unified and more complex than a binary can encompass, the third approach I want to suggest is a kind of meta-metonymic one that sees substitution, transference, and pattern-making occurring all at once.

Hence, there are (1) patterns that keep being repeated because they resemble basic propensities built into the nature of things — such as those reflected in the binaries that we seem so unable to jettison (self/other, us/them, up/down, male/female, mind/matter, nature/culture), (2) patterns that get generated through actual displacements in material relations (such as the changes that occur with specific technological inventions — the internal combustion engine, and so on), and (3) patterns that emerge in and through systems of pattern-organization that both precede, accompany, and creatively depart from from the real changes in relations over time.

The Anthropocene marks a recognition that the current political-ecological formation is unsustainable and rapidly endangering any humanly-viable futures. But the difficulty of thoroughly thinking the shift out of it to something more viable is a difficulty that will not be overcome until we have arrived at the “elsewhere” that will itself be indicative of that shift. We won’t know it until we have emerged out the other side.

What I am suggesting is that neither a substitution of metaphors (a la Moore, in Wark’s critique) nor an empirical study of how things are all entangled in complex and changing relations (which is what Wark at times seems to be suggesting, and what Moore’s work actually helps us do) will alone do the trick for us.

Earlier in the piece, Wark writes that

“The virtue of the metonymic path is that it does not depend on a master metaphor and hence is a place from which one can put the very act of conceptual doubling, with its play of mimesis and difference, under scrutiny – a practice of which Haraway, for example, is well known.”

What I’m getting at is this, but considered a bit more broadly. Placing all of our acts — those of conceptual doubling and those of transference — under scrutiny, and indeed in abeyance (while continuing to think and act), is part of what I think we will need to do before the next act, the shift from the (ill named) Anthropocene to whatever follows, will have been enacted. This will involve a lot of creative metaphorization and translation, as well as a lot of experimentation in thinking and in practice, without guarantees of any particular results.

The next collective move in that project may be how the nascent world community deals with the coming Paris climate summit. More on that soon.