The term “more-than-human” has become a popular way of designating the “nonhuman” within the environmental humanities. Other terms used include “other-than-human,” and much less frequently “unhuman” and “inhuman,” with the latter’s negative connotations upended (successfully or not) to read positively.
“More-than-human” was, to my knowledge, first used by David Abram in his 1996 ecophilosophical bestseller (inasmuch as ecophilosophy has bestsellers) The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. This was a beautifully written book, more convincing in its phenomenological analysis of perception (the book’s first part) than of language (the second), but a provocative and rewarding read nonetheless.
Abram referred in the book to a “more-than-human world” and to “more-than-human worlds,” and also to a more-than-human “realm,” “matrix,” and “ecology,” but, notably, not to individual entities as “more-than-humans.” (He also used “nonhuman” a lot more often than any of those.) Yet the idea of “more-than-humans,” in the plural, took off, as its suggestion that such entities — everything that isn’t human — is somehow more or qualitatively better than humans was something that many in the ecohumanities liked, if only for its value as provocation.
Language is just language — the “house of being,” pace Heidegger, but also a prison-house — and any terms we choose will have their better and worse uses and a limited shelf life. Twenty-five years after its introduction, the limitations of the “more-than-human” might be a little easier to see. “More-than-humans” suggests that these entities are human and then some, but the point is really that they are not human at all and that we haven’t quite grasped what that might mean. They are certainly other-than-human. They may be under-than and over-than human (earthworms and birds, for instance, respectively). But why should more be a point of pride as opposed to less — for instance, less harmful, less arrogant, and so on?
More to the point, all of these terms use the human as their central reference point and defining factor. Without the human to define them and measure them by, it appears, they are nothing, or nothing at least can be said about them.
Fortunately, in the world of cultural theory “after the ontological turn” (to those who have taken that turn), it’s become clear that there are as many ways of talking about the human as there are about the other-than-human. There are multiple worlds, multiple carvings-up of the ontological territory of relational existence. This makes it more of an effort to speak without assuming a single ontological register, but eco-humanists are precisely the people who should be making that effort. Many of them are. Over-relying on terms like “more-than-human” to designate entities, beings, or individuals who aren’t human seems to me a little lazy, perhaps even a little “all too human.”
Where the use of the word remains appropriate is as a sign of human entanglement within the meshwork of human-and-nonhuman stuff — the “more-than-human agencies” of the human body, for instance, with their bacterial and fungal biomes, or the multispecies life of a place that’s nevertheless still defined by its human terms (as such and such a place, bioregion, eco-community, et al.).
Perhaps, instead, it’s the world of Science/Speculative Fiction that’s gotten things right all along, with authors like Theodore Sturgeon using the term (minus the hyphens) as far back as 1953 to designate a humanity expanded by telepathy and by what one reviewer called a “poetic, panchromatic individuality.”
To recognize the other-than-humanity of our fellow beings, you might say, we need to expand the definitions of our own humanity, to become more-than-human ourselves. (Not trans-human, at least not that kind of transhuman; but let’s leave all possibilities open.)
This means to be anthropomorphically, and morphogenetically, active, dynamic, and open-ended, to pursue the becomings that are available to us, not for their own sake (like some neoliberal Beat philosophers) but for the sake of being better humans. More relational humans. More-than-but-also-still-ever-becoming-humans. (And perhaps that’s what artists like Tomas Saraceno have in mind in exhibitions like this.)
End of sermon. 🙂
Hi Adrian, been thinking about this a lot! I was thinking about strategies to help us get away from the re-centering and re-establishing of the category ‘human’ when we use terms like ‘more-than-human’ etc… Once we learn that the category human (imagine a circle) is not a perfect circle either ‘next to’ or ‘inside’ a category ‘nature’ but perhaps a permeable blob made up of many other blobs, some overlapping and some not. And is also not (a la Wynter) a category which can fully envelop all those who us steeped in the Greco-Christian tradition might think…
Two options which come to mind are: use another category ‘other than’ to replace human in our phrases and see how silly they sound: “the more-than-frog world”, “other-than-moose”, “the unsalmon” or “the invirus” – which I feel like gives us the sillyness needed!
The other option is to see what we do already when we use a category, “within” human – do we say, “Vermonters and other living things?” or “The more-than-American world”? Those both clearly center who is still the most important (Us!)! We might try to say, “Americans and other people” or, “Men and other people” (even as we note that there are people who do not fit in the categories provided – some people are dual citizens, some people exist (or still exist?) before nation-states, some people are children, etc) So we often say, “people”?
In practice, I find that specificity can often work: “I’m going to the forest to hunt squirrels” instead of, “I’m going to spend time in ‘nature’., or “It is my friend David’s birthday party” instead of, “It is a human’s birthday party”. or ‘Some relationships between domestic dogs and some young humans in Vermont” instead of “Human Animal Relationships”.
So we lose these broad categories (which I guess are tools which have outcomes, like a plow or a combustion engine is a tool which has outcomes) – but if the harm of them outweighs their flawed usage…? I think maybe this is what Max Liboiron talks about when they talk about the importance of Scale and Specificity of Relationships!