A passage in Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) recently led to my discovery of Ramin Bahrani’s masterpiece Plastic Bag (see →), a short film that features a narration by what has to be Germany’s greatest contribution to the resources of the English language, Werner Herzog and his distinct voice and style. As a work of philosophy, I rate Hyperobjects as second in importance only to Spinoza’s Ethics. In the way the former de-anthropomorphized God, the latter de-anthropomorphized nature. There is no longer an inside and outside. There is no nothingness into which we can dump waste. The atmosphere turns out not to be a very good sewer. Everything we do is connected into local systems and also into hyperobjects, like global warming. Hyperobjects are not infinite but temporarily and spatially massive. The plastic bag in Bahrani’s short film, a plastic bag that reminds me of the many floating and swirling plastic bags on the streets of New York City, realizes this, that it has the temporality of a hyperobject, and so longs for a smaller and more human scale. “If I could meet my maker,” says the bag, thinking that it was made by the woman who uses it to carry her groceries, “I would tell her just one thing: I wish she had created me, so I could die.”
In Western philosophy, Spinoza is the only thinker who saw the human as human the same as the human as animal.
Karl Marx: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act.” Capital, Vol. 1
I discuss this in “The Equalizer,” the second essay in my ongoing essay series entitled “The Inhabitants.” See “The Equalizer,” e-flux journal 70 (February 2016) →. The present essay is the third in the series.
See Ker Than, “Why Eyes Are So Alluring,” Live Science, November 7, 2006 →.
Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
This line of argument—chimpanzee as political animal—was first presented in “The Equalizer.”
In truth, the body does change, but very slowly.
A small part of the answer can be found in the first essay in this series, “Neoliberalism and the New Afro-Pessimism,” which concerns communal killing and the policing of bullies. See “Neoliberalism and the New Afro-Pessimism: Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyènes,” e-flux journal 67 (November 2015) →.
The next essay in this series will look at how the mechanism that keeps the strong in check and the weak in power—gossip—was replaced by a system that justifies competition, inequality, and the rude law of the strong, politics.