The classic, philosophical trope of subject versus object is retold by Morton through a metaphor on mixing and mastering audio: These will form “the thou” that Morton will use to address our ongoing ecological being. Morton settles on using versions of it and they. You reinforces the “not-you” of the I that speaks it. The pronoun I either conflates something with how it is processed through (and for) our Ego or it flattens the ecological landscape of things by privileging notions of themselves as extending naturally from the whole of Nature. The I A nd Thou of Martin Buber needs an update. So how exactly is a white man supposed to talk about anything outside of their own white-male-ness when others want them to sit down and be humble? This is something Morton is painfully self-aware of, stating, “there are no pronouns entirely suitable to describe ecological being.” Instead of saving Marxism from itself, Morton risks infecting Marx with the kind of New Age, panpsychic animism that haunts the eyes of The Serious Scholar, as they roll back into their head like a child ducks under their blanket to shield themselves from ghosts.Īcademia, to use Morton’s example, does not allow for the unironic enjoyment of songs like The Muppets’ “We Are All Earthlings.” For the “we” of The Muppets appropriates the beliefs of indigenous people in order to make white people feel better about their ability to “co-exist” with what they are passively destroying. Talk is cheap they say, with their glass half empty. Attempts at solidarity risk outright dismissal as too sentimental as lacking the necessary pragmatism needed for meaningful support. Humankind, however, is more than a self-serving gesture towards some vague and faceless Other, even though it reads likes a handbook for Not All White Guy Philosophers.īut worse than coming off as insincere is the opposite: as coming off as too sincere. And so a dedication to the water protectors, coming from Morton, can’t help but be read as a challenge to the patience of this intended audience. Humankind was written, after all, with a particular audience in mind: one steeped in the post-industrial identity politics of the New Left, which largely overlaps, through sheer transcontinental osmosis, with the collective experience of every graduate student who has sat through a class on Critical Theory or Marxism. Perhaps this is why Morton begins Humankind with a dedication to the water protectors at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, yet does not discuss their struggle at length. The category of “humankind” put forth by Morton becomes an inexhaustible reservoir of existential alienation, in which the human and the nonhuman must coexist in the strangest of places. “A specter is haunting the specter of communism,” Timothy Morton announces in Humankind (2017), “the specter of the nonhuman.” For Morton, haunting begets more haunting, and it’s specters all the way down.
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